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Claimants, primarily companies, won about 71 percent of trade secrets cases, and a majority of the defendants are former employees, according to new research from legal analytics research company Lex Machina.

Owen Byrd, general counsel and “chief evangelist” at Menlo Park, California-based Lex Machina, said on Thursday the research can be vital to a general counsel's decision-making.

“As general counsel of a tech company,” Byrd said, “we have patents and trademarks, while our 'natural language processing' is protected through trade secrets. In tech, trade secrets are the coin of the realm.”

The GC said Lex Machina tackled trade secrets cases because “it was the number one new case type that our users requested. It clearly is important to companies.”

He said GCs can use the analytics to help set their strategy, execute their tactics and improve the likelihood of success in litigation.

For instance, he said the data can guide GCs on choosing to sue under state or federal law, “by looking at how cases were treated by different judges in different jurisdictions.” (Occasionally a company ends up suing in both, as Goldman Sachs Group Inc. did in a trade secrets case over stolen computer source code decided earlier this month.)

When choosing outside counsel, Byrd said, the analytics can show which law firms in a district have the most experience with such claims.

Analytics also can shed light on whether to seek a temporary restraining order, file for summary judgment or increase a demand for damages, he added.

The research data include over 9,600 cases involving trade secret litigation pending in federal court since 2009, including those filed under the U.S. Defend Trade Secrets Act of 2016.

Besides data-mining millions of court documents, Lex Machina said it interviewed senior litigators from top law firms and major corporations for feedback on particular analytic requirements and cases.

Among other trends, the research found:

• More than 1,350 cases with DTSA claims have been filed during the two years since it was enacted on May 11, 2016.

• Federal court in the Central District of California saw the most trade secret cases (7 percent), followed by the Southern District of New York (5 percent) and the District of Illinois (5 percent).

• Only a few federal judges, however, have heard cases under the DTSA. Only 11 of the 550-plus currently active Article III (life-tenured) district judges have evaluated DTSA claims on contested motions or presided over the issue at trial.

Byrd said another interesting fact emerged from the data: “We found a lot of overlap between trade secret cases and employment law cases,” he said. It makes sense, he explained, that if a company is in litigation with a former employee, it would use its employment lawyer on trade secret theft, rather than an intellectual property lawyer.

“The data reveals a real opportunity for outside IP-centric firms to compete for and win this business, which could benefit from being handled by IP lawyers,” he said.

Lex Machina is a unit of LexisNexis Group Inc., with which ALM LLC, the parent company of Corporate Counsel and Law.com, has a content licensing agreement.