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3 January 2020Sarah Morgan

Workday sues Washington State Uni to stop trade secrets leak

Software company Workday has sued Washington State University (WSU) to stop it from disclosing trade secrets to a market research company.

Workday shared confidential information with WSU about its operations as part of a contract bid to provide the university with software products, according to the lawsuit, filed at the US District Court for the Eastern District of Washington on Monday, December 30.

The software company provided the information under a non-disclosure agreement which, according to Workday, identified 29 of the 207 pages of its proposal as containing confidential and proprietary trade secret information. In June 2018, Workday was awarded the contract with WSU.

More than one year later, in October 2019, market research company the Tambellini Group made a public records request seeking “numerous documents” from WSU regarding Workday’s products and services, with the “stated goal of using the information to ‘advise clients’—meaning that it could be sold to competitors”.

Focusing on the educational technology market, Tambellini Group advises vendors of education technology solutions (like Workday or its competitors), investment firms and higher education institutions on the marketing, development, and selection of technology solutions.

Workday said that, while not objecting to the disclosure of most of the information sought by the request, it had identified a handful of documents that contain confidential and proprietary trade secret information and shouldn’t be disclosed.

According to the suit, WSU said it would release the documents unless Workday obtained a court order preventing it from doing so. In response, Workday identified a “narrow universe” of information in the proposal and its attachments that include proprietary, confidential and/or trade secrets.

WSU agreed to redact certain portions of that information from its response but said that the balance of Workday’s proposal would be subject to disclosure and that, unless Workday sought a court order by December 30, 2019, the information would be disclosed.

As an example, Workday cited section 32 of the proposal, which describes how the company manages data and request processing, the technology by which Workday performs this, and how it scales to “very large volumes in an always-consistent way”.

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