A USB drive, 79 lost customers, and a legal bill bigger than the verdict
A sales rep copied hundreds of confidential company files to a personal hard drive the day before quitting - then used them at a competitor.
That is the core of this case, a trade secrets case the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals decided on November 9, 2026. The court affirmed a jury verdict finding the former seed sales representative willfully and maliciously misappropriated his employer’s trade secrets - and the fallout was dramatic.
The worker sold seed to farmers in Iowa for Wilbur-Ellis, an agribusiness company. According to the court’s account, the day before submitting his resignation in August 2021, he copied his Microsoft Outlook file and hundreds of other files to a personal external hard drive. The copied material included detailed customer purchase information, sales forecasts, budgets, strategies, product discounts, and customer-specific terms and discounts - material the company treated as confidential and restricted behind password protections and need-to-know access.
He also kept physical documents containing historical customer data, which he acknowledged could provide a competitive advantage.
Then he joined competitor Simplot.
From there, the court found, he put the information to use. He drew on Wilbur-Ellis’s data to help negotiate dealer agreements at Simplot, shared pricing and volume details with his new team, and disclosed Wilbur-Ellis’s dealer agreement terms and historical sales information to Simplot employees. He also used Wilbur-Ellis’s relationship with Bayer to obtain seed for Simplot customers before Simplot was even authorized to sell those products.
The customer exodus was near-total. Before the departure, Wilbur-Ellis’s Creston, Iowa operation generated nearly $2 million in sales at a 20% target profit margin. After the worker and other sales team members left, 79 of the company’s 80 Creston-area customers moved their business to Simplot. Wilbur-Ellis tried to hold on - recruiting, temporarily reassigning sales coverage, and employing contract sellers - but the efforts proved futile. The company shut down its Creston operations entirely.
A jury found the misappropriation was willful and malicious. It awarded $66,000 in compensatory damages and a further $132,000 in exemplary damages - a penalty reserved for willful and malicious conduct - totalling $198,000. The district court then added $447,824.16 in attorney’s fees and $11,226.75 in costs, authorized under both the federal Defend Trade Secrets Act and Iowa’s trade secrets statute.
On appeal, the Eighth Circuit affirmed the merits verdict in full. The evidence was sufficient, the court held: the worker copied protected files, used them at his new employer, and virtually all of Wilbur-Ellis’s Creston customers followed him out the door.
But the court found a problem with the fees. Wilbur-Ellis had originally sought $1.56 million in damages and recovered roughly 13% of that amount. Under Supreme Court precedent, a district court must consider the “overall degree of success” when setting a reasonable fee - and this court had not done so. Its reductions addressed hourly rates, billing practices, and litigation conduct, but never the gap between what the employer asked for and what it actually recovered.
The Eighth Circuit vacated the fees award - meaning it set the amount aside - and sent the question back to the district court. The lower court could conclude the $198,000 recovery justifies the fees it awarded, or it could decide the mismatch warrants a reduction.
For HR teams weighing whether to pursue a trade secrets claim, the case lays bare a hard truth: the legal bill can eclipse the verdict, even when the facts are firmly on the employer’s side.
