March 5, 2019 — The opposing sides in the industrial espionage lawsuit filed by National Fish & Seafood against a Florida competitor have spent much of the past two months wrangling over discovery and a federal judge has set deadlines that could end the squabbling and allow the case to move forward.
U.S. District Court Judge M. Page Kelly on Friday acceded to requests from Gloucester-based National Fish and Florida-based Tampa Bay Fisheries and other defendants to extend the deadlines for discovery.
Kelly, who sits in federal court in Boston, set March 15 as the deadline for all written fact discovery and April 15 for the close of all fact discovery.
In its lawsuit, National Fish claims that executives at Florida-based Tampa Bay Fisheries encouraged and conspired with Kathleen A. Scanlon, a former National Fish employee, to copy “substantial volumes of NFS’ confidential business information and trade secrets” in her final days at National Fish before she started a position with Tampa Bay Fisheries.
Scanlon, who rose to chief of research and development and quality control in her 23 years at National Fish, denies the allegations, as do the other Tampa Bay executives named as defendants.