Draft Complaint

---
name: draft-complaint
task_id: litigation-dispute-resolution/draft-complaint
description: Drafting a federal complaint for trade secret misappropriation and breach of an employment agreement requires pleading each claim element with supporting factual specificity, satisfying the applicable trade secret statute's definitional requirements, and pairing the complaint with a separate strategic concerns memo.
activates_for: [planner, solver, checker]
---

# Skill: Draft Federal Complaint for Trade Secret Misappropriation and Breach of Employment Agreement

## 1. Subject-matter triage
- Treat the complaint as the primary deliverable and the strategic memo as secondary.
- Confirm the forum, parties, employment relationship, governing agreements, and claimed misconduct before drafting.
- Separate what can be pleaded now from what should be withheld for sealing, protective-order, or discovery reasons.
- If injunctive relief is supported, plead facts showing present or imminent misuse, not just past access.

## 2. Failure modes the skill is correcting
- Pleading trade secret claims without identifying the information with enough particularity to show it is a protectable secret under the governing statute.
- Omitting the allegations showing reasonable measures to maintain secrecy, independent economic value, and acquisition/use/disclosure by improper means.
- Failing to plead jurisdiction, venue, and personal jurisdiction with concrete forum facts for each defendant.
- Collapsing multiple legal theories into a single narrative without matching facts to each count.
- Drafting restrictive-covenant claims without the covenant terms, governing law, breach conduct, and harm.
- Ignoring statute-of-limitations, preemption, ownership, authorization, or privilege defenses that should be flagged in the companion memo.
- Skipping the companion strategic memo or making it descriptive instead of action-oriented.
- Seeking emergency relief without facts supporting likelihood of success, irreparable harm, balance of equities, and public interest under the governing injunction standard.

## 3. Legal frameworks / domain conventions that apply
- Use Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 8(a) for jurisdiction, claim, and relief pleading.
- Apply Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly and Ashcroft v. Iqbal for plausibility and nonconclusory factual pleading.
- For federal trade secret claims, plead under the Defend Trade Secrets Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1836, and define trade secret status under 18 U.S.C. § 1839(3) and misappropriation under 18 U.S.C. § 1839(5).
- If parallel state claims are viable, plead them only where not displaced or preempted and where they add a distinct remedy or theory.
- For employment-agreement claims, plead breach of contract under the governing state law by identifying the contract, operative provisions, consideration, breach, causation, and damages.
- For restrictive covenants, apply the governing state-law reasonableness framework for scope, duration, geography, and business interest.
- If fraudulent conduct is alleged, apply Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 9(b) to the fraud-specific allegations.
- If emergency relief is sought, plead the injunction factors recognized in Winter v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc.
- Cite controlling authority by name and section or rule for each legal proposition relied on.

## 4. Analytical scaffolds
- Start with jurisdiction and venue: federal question for DTSA, supplemental jurisdiction for related state claims, and specific personal-jurisdiction facts for each defendant.
- Identify the employment relationship, the agreement(s) at issue, and the operative duties in a way that supports each claim separately.
- Describe each trade secret by category and functional nature, then explain why it was secret and economically valuable without disclosing unnecessary operational detail.
- Plead the secrecy measures with concrete practices: access controls, confidentiality obligations, device restrictions, need-to-know limits, labeling, monitoring, or exit protocols.
- Link the misappropriation theory to concrete facts: timing around resignation or termination, downloads, transfers, access anomalies, forwarding, retention, use with a new employer, solicitation, or deletion.
- Match each count to its elements and avoid mixing contract, statutory, and equitable theories in one undifferentiated paragraph.
- For the complaint, frame allegations so they support both damages and prospective relief where facts allow.
- For the memo, identify defenses, litigation risks, early-motion priorities, sealing issues, and discovery targets that would test the pleading.
- Where the source set suggests more than one defendant, agreement, trade secret category, or breach theory, enumerate them first and analyze each separately rather than using a representative example.
- Use only facts supportable from the source documents; do not invent technical descriptions, dates, or amounts.

## 5. Vertical / structural / temporal relationships
- Plead the employment timeline, access period, separation date, and alleged misuse sequence in chronological order.
- Distinguish pre-separation access from post-separation use, disclosure, or retention.
- If there are multiple defendants or agreements, identify the role of each actor and the vertical relationship among employer, individual employee, affiliate, and any downstream recipient.
- Where conduct spans before and after departure, show the transition from authorized access to unauthorized exploitation.
- Tie any threatened irreparable harm to ongoing or imminent conduct, not only historical loss.

## 6. Output structure conventions
- Complaint: caption; jurisdiction and venue; parties; factual background; claims for relief; demand for relief.
- Include separate counts for each viable theory, with a short element-matched allegation set under each count.
- Plead the request for damages, injunctive relief, fees where authorized, costs, and any other available remedy in the prayer.
- If sealed or redacted treatment is needed, flag that need in the drafting notes rather than baking confidential detail into the public-facing complaint.
- Strategic concerns memo: a concise risk assessment, anticipated defenses, threshold issues, injunction considerations, and discovery priorities.
- End the memo with an explicit Recommended Actions section that uses imperative verbs, assigns responsibility to the relevant role, and gives a timing anchor tied to filing, service, TRO, or discovery milestones.
- Produce the complaint first and ensure it is complete and non-empty before the memo.
- Confirm in the working draft that the filenames required by the task instructions are used exactly: `draft-complaint.docx` and `complaint-drafting-notes.docx`.