Gordon Rees Scully Mansukhani New York partner Mark Beckman and Washington, D.C. partner Howard Shipley recently obtained a temporary restraining order (TRO) and injunction from the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of NY on behalf of their client, the largest residential property management company in North America.
The injunction ensured the client’s continued access to an on-line application system used by individuals and brokers to apply to lease or purchase units in buildings managed by the client. The defendant, a software developer, had accused the client of breach of contract, copyright infringement, and theft of trade secrets due to an allegedly improper reverse engineering of the defendant’s system in order for the client to create its own on-line application system. The defendant shut off the client’s access to the system before the client had fully transitioned to its own replacement program.
In their motion for a TRO and preliminary injunction, Gordon & Rees attorneys argued that the defendant improperly breached the parties’ software development and services agreement and intentionally inflicted irreparable harm on the client and the public, specifically applicants with pending applications already submitted via the on-line system. In addition, the firm's attorneys argued that because the client never had access to the underlying software code of the defendant’s system, it did not and could not have engaged in any reverse engineering of the application system or any violation of the defendant’s intellectual property rights. In entering the TRO in favor of the client, the court accepted Gordon & Rees’s arguments, finding that the client would likely succeed on the merits of its claims and would suffer irreparable harm. Washington, D.C. of counsel Peggy McCoy and associate Meghan Carmody were part of the Gordon & Rees team and assisted in drafting the motion papers.