Alcoa v. aluminum extrusion manufacturer (Boeing wing spar data theft)

Ongoing half-billion-dollar lawsuit. A small extrusion plant hired away workers from Alcoa's Lafayette, Indiana facility; ten years later they captured 45% of Boeing's wing-spar business. Tom is involved as expert; the contention is that the defendants could not have generated 100-sample/10-heat MMPDS data on their own. The case anchors Tom's teaching point that MMPDS qualification is so expensive it creates an incentive for data theft.

I'll give you an example. Right now I'm involved in a lawsuit of Alcoa against another aluminum manufacturer for ten years. This other aluminum manufacturer, a little extrusion plant, they were hiring people away from Alcoa's Lafayette Indiana facility, and then all of a sudden ten years later they get 45% of Boeing's wing business for the spars for the wings. That and the landing gear are the two critical parts of designing an aircraft. Those are the things Alcoa or Boeing will never give up. How did they get a hundred spars from ten different heats? Well, the answer is they didn't. Now they're in a half-billion-dollar lawsuit where we're trying to show that they stole it — they stole the data, and it was Alcoa's data that they got. That's the whole story about how they did it, but that's what the lawsuit's all about. They claim, oh, you could just find this in literature.

Active consulting case at time of recording. Alcoa lost 50% of its aircraft wing spar business to a competitor that stole trade-secret tighter compositional specs on 7150 aluminum. Used to teach the difference between published Aluminum Association alloy designations and proprietary internal specs, and the contractual auditing arrangements between alloy supplier (Alcoa) and aircraft OEM (Boeing/Airbus).

I'm involved right now in a problem between Alcoa and another company that stole fifty percent of Alcoa's business for aircraft wings. Alcoa is not happy. They laid off 600 people on January first because they lost fifty percent of their business. They make the wing spars for Boeing, for Airbus, essentially everything. They had a semi-monopoly. There are two primary alloys, one's a 2000 series, one's a 7000. The 7000 series they actually use, they sell as 7150 — you can look on the web and find out the aircraft wings are 7150 alloy, which is an Aluminum Association designation. But Alcoa has a tighter internal spec that they actually make them to, and that's a trade secret.