A DNA sequencing company in California and a rotary die cutting manufacturer in North Carolina both sued former business partners for stealing trade secrets under the Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA). Both complaints described the alleged secrets in general terms: customer databases, proprietary processes, confidential business information. One case moved forward. The other was dismissed at the pleading stage, the threshold at which a court decides whether a complaint states a viable claim. The difference was not the lawyering, the facts, or the statutory text; it was the forum.

The DTSA, enacted in 2016 as an amendment to the Economic Espionage Act (EEA), Pub. L. No. 114-153, 18 U.S.C. § 1836, created the first private civil federal cause of action for trade secret misappropriation. The statute defines “trade secret” broadly under 18 U.S.C. § 1839(3), but says nothing about how specifically a plaintiff must identify those secrets in a complaint. That silence has produced a circuit split that was, in hindsight, predictable from the statute’s design.