Department opted to reconsider its decision, and, in October 2015, announced it had revised the competitive range for the WASS project, so that DynCorp’s original proposal fell within the revised range. Pursuant to government regulations, the State Department is now requii%d to accept revised bids, consistent with the newly revised competitive range.
In about August 2012, three DynCorp employees—Terrance Fisher, Angela Pilk-ington and James Christian Thomas—all of whom had signed confidentiality and non-disclosure agreements with DynCorp, left that company to work for AAR. Nearly three years later, on April 21, 2015, AAR part-time employee Michael Peterson, who was working on the WASS-bid project for AAR, opened an email in his personal account from Tom Cline—-Peterson’s longtime professional contact and friend, and President of DynCorp subcontractor Eagle Aviation Services & Technology (“EAST”).1 The email said, “take a look, seems bizarre,” and attached what turned out to be DynCorp’s “Profit Margin Analysis” (“PMA”). According to the complaint, the PMA is “a detailed spreadsheet [with] approximately twenty discrete tabs, and collectively consists of nearly 10,000 rows of confidential data [and] trade secrets about [DynCorp’s] quarterly and prior performance on the Incumbent Contract, including staffing, labor, costs, profit margins, overhead, revenue and other financial data, [which] provide[d] direct insight into [DynCorp’s] operations and pricing strategies on the Incumbent Contract.”
When he received the email, Peterson quickly scanned the attachment. Once he noticed that the document was related to the State Department Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, he became concerned that it might contain sensitive information and immediately closed it. Peterson also decided to notify AAR, so he forwarded Cline’s email from his personal account to his AAR email account. On May 1, 2015, when AAR’s Director of Business Development Rich Walberg stepped into his office, Peterson asked him to take a look at the email and attachment. Walberg looked briefly at the attachment and immediately told Peterson to close it without viewing its content. Peterson subsequently deleted the email and attachment from his AAR email account. That same day, AAR’s general counsel sent an email to the State Department’s contracting officer for the WASS program, informing him of the situation.
The following day, May 2, 2015, AAR arranged for Jason Dieterle, an independent computer consultant, to go to Peterson’s home to secure and image his personal computer. Two days later, on May 4, 2015, at AAR’s request, Dieterle returned to Peterson’s home to copy the Cline email and attachment onto a thumb drive, which he then personally delivered to the State Department’s contracting officer for the WASS program. Thereafter, Peterson permanently deleted the Cline email from his personal computer and the image created by Dieterle.
Meanwhile, on April 27, 2015—six days after Peterson received Cline’s email and four days before he notified AAR—a former human resources manager at AAR (“the Whistleblower”) notified • DynCorp that AAR had misappropriated trade secrets related to DynCorp’s performance on the WASS contract. The Whistleblower said that, while AAR was preparing its original WASS bid, which had been submitted in October 2014, five members of AAR’s senior management team engaged in a concerted effort to hire away Thomas, Pilkington, and Fisher from DynCorp and
1
EAST also had a confidentiality agreement with DynCorp.