Jury Returns Nearly $117 Million Verdict Against Joby Aero in Supplier Trade-Secret Case

Aerosonic manufactures air-data probes that help aircraft systems determine measurements such as airspeed, altitude, angle of attack, and sideslip. According to the litigation record and reporting, the companies entered into a confidentiality agreement in 2021, and Aerosonic later supplied probes to Joby.

Aerosonic alleged that it shared proprietary designs, engineering information, and test data during the relationship and that Joby used protected information to develop its own probe. Joby maintained that it independently developed its system through its own engineering work.

Aviation International News, reporting from the verdict form, states that the jury awarded approximately:

The jury also reportedly rejected Joby’s counterclaims and defenses. These are jury findings, not complaint-stage allegations—but they remain subject to post-trial motions, entry of judgment, and possible appeal. The reported figure is the jury’s verdict, not an amount finally owed after judicial review.

The case is instructive because the jury addressed both contractual confidentiality and statutory trade-secret protection. Those concepts overlap, but they are distinct.

An NDA is a contract. Its scope depends on its actual terms: what is defined as confidential, permitted uses, authorized recipients, exclusions, return obligations, ownership provisions, and duration.

A trade secret must independently satisfy the statute. Under 18 U.S.C. § 1839, information generally must derive independent economic value from not being generally known or readily ascertainable through proper means, and must be subject to reasonable secrecy measures.

Information can therefore be protected by a contract even where a party disputes whether it qualifies as a statutory trade secret. Conversely, signing an NDA does not turn everything exchanged into a trade secret. A dispute may involve one theory, the other, or both—and in Aerosonic, the two reached the jury separately.

Trade-secret law generally does not prevent a company from developing the same or similar technology through lawful independent work. Developing a competing product after receiving confidential information is not automatically unlawful.

But when independent development is disputed, the issue becomes highly factual. A company developing technology after receiving another company’s confidential information should preserve contemporaneous records, such as:

Trade-secret cases rarely turn on a claim that the other side took “our technology.” Numerous specifically identified items of technical information and asserted trade secrets were reportedly presented to the Aerosonic jury.

Both disclosing and receiving companies should be able to answer: What exactly was disclosed, and when? Who received it? What restrictions applied? What was already public or independently known? How was it later used, if at all?

Under 18 U.S.C. § 1836, remedies for proven misappropriation can include actual loss, unjust enrichment not otherwise counted, a reasonable royalty in appropriate cases, and injunctive relief. For willful and malicious misappropriation, a court may award exemplary damages of up to two times the damages awarded under the statute, and attorney fees in specified circumstances. These remedies are not automatic.

The best time to address these issues is before information is exchanged. Depending on the relationship, a business may want its startup contracts, IP ownership, and commercial agreements to address the permitted purpose, authorized personnel, copying and reverse-engineering limits, background and newly created IP ownership, return or deletion, and how independently developed technology will be documented.

An NDA is also far more useful when the parties can later prove what was disclosed under it. File-transfer logs, document-room histories, version-controlled files, recipient lists, and dated meeting records help the disclosing party prove what it shared—and help the receiving party separate it from what it already knew.

Joby is also involved in separate California litigation against Archer Aviation over alleged trade-secret misuse by a former employee. That case concerns employee mobility and competition. Aerosonic concerns technical information exchanged between businesses under a confidentiality agreement—and it proceeded to a jury verdict.

The verdict illustrates that contractual confidentiality and statutory trade-secret protection are related but distinct—and that detailed records concerning disclosures, access, and independent technical development can become critical when a commercial relationship reaches trial.

Mahrouyan Law, P.C. represents businesses and founders in selected business and commercial litigation and trade-secret and intellectual-property disputes, and advises companies on confidentiality, IP ownership, and vendor agreements.