Orlando Sentinel April 5, 2006
Lockheed suit: Orlando unit's secrets stolen
L-3 Communications, Mediatech and ex-managers named in lawsuit
By Richard Burnett
With a $1 billion deal at stake, Lockheed Martin Corp. has sued three former employees, a key competitor and a subcontractor, accusing them of conspiring to steal trade secrets involving a lucrative simulation-training contract managed in Orlando.
The lawsuit details a series of alleged misdeeds -- from eleventh-hour document downloads to clandestine employment pacts -- that Lockheed says were designed to undercut its efforts to win an upcoming Air Force training contract.
According to court documents filed last week in U.S. District Court in Orlando, the three former Lockheed managers colluded with L-3 Communications Corp. and Mediatech Inc. to obtain proprietary contract data from Lockheed.
The former managers, all three of whom now work for L-3, are accused in the lawsuit of diverting critical financial and technical data to L-3 while temporarily working for Mediatech, a former Lockheed subcontractor based in Volusia County.
Ultimately, according to the suit, the stolen data could improve New York-based L-3's chances of beating Lockheed for a lucrative Air Force contract potentially worth $1 billion over 10 years.
"Lockheed Martin welcomes fair and open competition for new business opportunities," spokesman Peter Harrigan said Tuesday. "We are taking legal action because there is evidence of efforts to skew the playing field through wrongful access to and use of Lockheed Martin trade secrets."
The former employees of Lockheed's Orlando simulation training unit -- Kevin Speed, Steve Fleming and Patrick St. Romain -- dispute Lockheed's allegations and deny any wrongdoing, according to court documents. Lockheed has no real evidence that any proprietary information was misappropriated or misused, the defendants say.
The court documents indicate that the ex-Lockheed managers maintain there was no conspiracy or collusion. They simply got new and better jobs.
A lawyer representing L-3 in the case could not be reached Tuesday for comment. Mediatech officials would not comment on the case.
Lockheed's latest action seeks to amend an earlier suit, filed last fall, that had targeted only the three ex-employees. New evidence, Lockheed alleges, shows that L-3 and Mediatech were involved.
The company is seeking court injunctions to bar any use of the ill-gotten data, court orders requiring the return of all documents, and unspecified monetary damages.
According to Bethesda, Md.-based Lockheed, the three ex-employees were once crucial to one of its major military-training programs in Orlando -- the Aircrew Training & Rehearsal Support contract, won almost six years ago by the company's simulation-training unit, which is based on Lake Underhill Road in east Orlando.
That deal, which has been worth almost $500 million to Lockheed, expires in September, the company said, but the Air Force is preparing to put the next-generation contract up for bid this month.
Lockheed's amended lawsuit alleges that, even before they left the company,the former employees were secretly helping L-3 and Mediatech develop a bid for the next Aircrew contract .
Lockheed also alleges that a forensic analysis of the ex-managers' computers revealed that they had downloaded and copied a large number of documents before leaving the company.
Fleming, in particular, copied about 1,500 pages of "confidential, proprietary and competitively sensitive documents" during his last hours of employment, the suit alleges.
But St. Romain, in court documents, states that Lockheed had no clear practice for identifying something as proprietary or a trade secret. The company also failed to establish procedures to prevent disclosure of supposed trade secrets by current or departing workers, he said.
Lockheed disputes that, noting that many of the documents taken by the ex-workers -- particularly those containing financial data -- were clearly marked as proprietary.
Such high-tech trade-secret litigation has become more common in the defense industry in recent years, according to John Pike, an industry analyst and founder of GlobalSecurity.org, a research organization in Washington, D.C.
"The challenge is that, on one hand, nobody has a lifetime job, right? So people are going to move around and look for better opportunities," he said. "On the other hand, much of what makes a company competitive is in people's heads, in their briefcases or on hard drives. Sorting all that out can be very difficult."
© Copyright 2006, Orlando Sentinel
