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Armored-vehicle manufacturers in a legal scrap
By Dan McCue
Staff Writer
Armored-vehicle manufacturer Force Protection Inc. is suing competitor Protected Vehicles Inc., charging the latter with stealing its trade secrets.
The 29-page lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court in Charleston on Tuesday, asserts that Garth Barrett and other former Force Protection executives who left the Ladson-based company two years ago to found Protected Vehicles left with more than their contributions to their 401(k) plans. The lawsuit claims they misappropriated confidential and proprietary information.
According to the lawsuit, the misappropriated information includes design details related to Force Protection’s ballistic- and blast-protected vehicles, as well as lists of suppliers for the raw materials that go into the armored, mine-resistant vehicles.
In court papers, Force Protection’s attorneys, Anne Louise Ross and John H. Tiller of the Charleston law firm Haynsworth Sinkler Boyd P.A., said Barrett—a founder of Force Protection and also, at various times, its president, chief technology officer and facility security officer—“had unlimited access to the trade secrets and confidential information belonging to Force Protection relating to all aspects of (its) various armored vehicle products, including research, design, development, manufacturing, marketing, sales, and testing.”
Force Protection charges that Protected Vehicles relied on that information to “unfairly compete with the armored vehicles produced by Force Protection, in particular, the Buffalo, Cougar, and the Cheetah.”
Barrett’s co-defendants in the civil suit are Thomas Thebes, Force Protection’s former vice president of finance, and Paul Palmer, the company’s former production planner.
In all, the North Charleston-based PVI, which earlier this week announced it was laying off more than 230 workers, must answer to 11 counts. The defendants stand accused of computer fraud, copyright infringement, violating the South Carolina Trade Secrets Act, torturous interference with contractual relations, unfair trade practices, breach of contract and civil conspiracy, among other charges.
Force Protection is seeking injunctive relief, return of computer hard drives and other storage media it believes were taken from its facility by the defendants, damages and recovery of its court costs and attorneys’ fees.
According to the lawsuit, while employed by Force Protection, Barrett used an external hard drive to create a copy of the hard drive from his Force Protection computer that contained trade secrets and confidential information, and took it home.
The suit charges that he refused to surrender this external hard drive when Force Protection learned about it and issued a written demand that he do so.
Barrett resigned from Force Protection on Aug. 25, 2005, telling at least one company official that he had no intention of competing with his former employer in connection with the design, development, manufacture, marketing or sale of armored vehicles, the suit alleges.
But little more than a week later, the lawsuit states, Barrett “or others acting on his behalf” registered the Web domain name protectedvehicles.com, with the title “Protected Vehicles for Mine, IED, Blast Armored Trucks,” and began posting content on the new site.
Two days after that, on Sept. 7, 2005, Barrett reserved the corporate name “Protected Vehicles Inc.” The company was originally incorporated in South Carolina but has since been re-incorporated in Delaware.
Thebes resigned from Force Protection a week later and joined PVI.
Following Thebes’ departure from Force Protection, a number of employees of Force Protection’s finance department also resigned and joined PVI. The lawsuit also charges that PVI actively recruited several members of Force Protection’s research and development department “as well as several critical welders.”
Officials at the two companies declined to comment on the lawsuit Thursday morning. PVI has yet to file a response to the charges.
Both companies are among a growing number of manufacturers around the country vying for orders from the Pentagon, which is awarding production contracts for at least 8,000 mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles, or MRAPs, as part of a $12 billion program.
Force Protection’s fortunes have continued to improve in recent months with the company recently announcing plans to purchase a new 430,000-square-foot facility in Roxboro, N.C., to expand its production capacity.
Protected Vehicles, meanwhile, has been struggling. Its only existing order, with the U.S. Marine Corps for 60 armored vehicles, was filled this month and it lost out on a recent bid to acquire additional work. The company’s layoffs earlier this month were attributed directly to its failure to get enough orders from the federal government to sustain its work force, which numbered up to 500.
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