Legal Question in Business Law in California

Re: Business ethics

You could have a good lawsuit against the utility and against the winning bidder if your former inspectors wind up becoming employed under the competitor's contract. Watch out for legal time limits.

Re: Business ethics

These actions suggest two general categories of legal wrongs.

The first is misappropriation of trade secrets. This subject is largely covered by the California version of the Uniform Trade Secrets Act, which prohibits a variety of bad conduct in the business-intelligence area, and probably covers what's happening here, but I would need to review case law carefully to find appellate decisions with facts closely paralleling yours. Nevertheless, I'd say even without research that this is one of the many kinds of trade-secret abuse that the Act was intended to prohibit, and for which it provides remedies for an injured party. Even if the UTSA didn't cover this, there may be a case based on common-law trade-secret principles.

The other general area where the law was (probably) broken would be that this conduct would be a tort that would bear a name such as "tortious interference with prospective business advantage" or the like. Again, since the prospective business advantage here was to flow from a contract with the very same party to be accused of the interference, some research would have to be done to find decisions with analytically similar fact patterns. That would be a lot simpler than going into court and pleading an entirely new fact pattern and trying to convince a judge that this pattern is also one which is tortious and deserves a remedy.

Also, this type of conduct suggests there may be additional facts, such as bribery, causing the behavior, which seems to me and my colleagues to be egregiously wrong, especially for a utility, whose officers and managers should know better.

Is it a private utility, such as Southern California Edison, or a municipal untility like LADW&P? The requirements and time-lines for suit differ.

I have experience in matters of this sort and could handle the matter, even in Southern California, economically and effectively. Please contact me directly if interested.