§ 1.5.3 Broadness and Overbreadth. Like the requirement of specificity, an order must not be too broad. Generally, an order may be too broad in two ways. Poor draftsmanship may result in the order arguably prohibiting authorized activities, or legal error by the court may extend the scope of the injunction too far and restrain permissible activities.
Overbreadth arising from poorly worded orders is illustrated by E.W. Bliss Co. v. Struthers-Dunn, Inc., 408 F.2d 1108 (8th Cir. 1969) . In Bliss , the defendant was restrained from utilizing plaintiff’s former employees in a number of broadly defined electronic engineering categories. Id. at 1111. The order was reversed because it was found to be far broader than warranted by the findings of fact, of which only one was relevant to the trade secret being protected.
Eagle does not claim that it alone possesses as a trade secret “time delay relays of the split coil type employing solid state circuitry”, “solid state process control systems” or “solid state traffic control apparatus”. Yet this order prevents the defendants from competing in these broad fields. The mischief of such an order is that a court may find that an employer possesses a trade secret in a wide field, such as electronic computers and process control systems, and even though the secret may relate to a minute detail within this wide field, the...
