Jawbone and Fitbit logos circa 2017. (Courtesy photos)

A federal jury in San Jose handed prosecutors a resounding defeat Monday in the first case to go to trial accusing former Jawbone employees of stealing trade secrets and taking them to rival Fitbit.

Monday morning, less than two hours into deliberations after a two-week trial, jurors returned a not guilty verdict on all six charges facing Katherine Mogal, the former director of market and customer experience insights at Jawbone.

Randy Luskey, one of Mogal's lawyers at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, said in a phone interview Monday shortly after the verdict was delivered that the jury's decision marked the end of a "five-year nightmare" for his client, who now works at Google.

Mogal was among six former Jawbone employees indicted in June 2018 on federal trade secrets charges. All six were witnesses in a 2016 U.S. International Trade Commission proceeding that the now-defunct Jawbone pursued against Fitbit. The ITC found no theft of trade secrets and a separate civil proceeding in California state court fell apart in 2017 after Jawbone went out of business.

Federal prosecutors contended that Mogal had retained access to proprietary Jawbone documents through two cloud-based applications, CrashPlan and Dropbox, after she left to join Fitbit. But Mogal's lawyers at Orrick argued that the Jawbone documents had been saved as part of routine backups of her work at Jawbone, that she nor anyone else used them at Fitbit, and that they weren't protected by trade secrets in the first place.

"She's been living with this case in one form or another for five years," said Luskey of his client. "The weight of the world was immediately lifted from her shoulders" when the verdict was read, he said. Luskey was joined on the trial team by Orrick's Walt Brown and Melinda Haag and Miranda Kane of Kane+Kimball.

Abraham Simmons, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California, which prosecuted the case, said the office respects the jurors' verdict. "We remain committed to bringing the criminal intellectual property cases that we believe are necessary to protect innovation in the district and throughout the country," Simmons said.

Federal prosecutors dropped charges against one defendant, former Jawbone design and user researcher Ana Rosario, in December in the run-up to Mogal's trial. When asked Monday if the office would continue to prosecute cases against the four remaining defendants, Simmons said the office "will review the verdict to see if it has any effect on other prosecutions."

"As always, each case will proceed on its own merits," he said.

Monday's trial victory had some added significance for the Orrick team beyond the acquittal for their client. Federal prosecutors previously attempted to disqualify Orrick and Luskey from representing Mogal claiming they were conflicted by previous representations of Fitbit and Mogul's co-defendants during the criminal investigation and prior civil litigation. However, U.S. District Judge Beth Labson Freeman of the Northern District of California, who has overseen the cases, turned back that disqualification attempt. She found that Mogal's co-defendants had "knowingly, voluntarily, and intelligently" signed off on three rounds of waivers allowing for Orrick's continued representation of Mogal.