J&J Subsidiaries Sue Former Employees for Theft of Trade Secrets

Three subsidiaries of Johnson & Johnson (J&J) who work in medical robotics have filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in Northern California against Noah Medical and 13 individual defendants, claiming three former employees and 10 others collectively stole 26,000 documents of trade secret materials.

The stolen materials allegedly include 81 gigabytes of source code, designs and test cases the lawsuit claims the defendants have used to file patent applications.

The three J&J subsidiaries — Auris Health, Verb Surgical and Cilag GmbH International — claim that Noah Medical’s founder, CEO Jian Zhang, a former Auris employee who left the company in 2015, acknowledged that he retained documents from Auris and promised to return them, but never has.

Noah Medical, founded in 2018, announced the development of a bronchoscopic robotic system that is nearing completion and has a second product in development and a third being conceptualized. “The speed of Noah’s product development is a direct result of Noah’s misappropriation of [J&J’s] trade secrets,” the complaint alleges.