The Arkansas Business Journal recently featured Bartko Pavia LLP’s major courtroom victory in the Zest Labs v. Walmart case, where a federal jury awarded Zest Labs $222.7 million in a trade secrets retrial against the retail giant.
This latest verdict more than doubles the original $115 million awarded in 2021. The jury found that Walmart intentionally misappropriated Zest’s groundbreaking technology for predicting produce shelf-life. The $222.7 million award includes $72.7 million in compensatory damages and $150 million in punitive damages, markingone of the largest trade secret verdicts in Arkansas history.
Patrick M. Ryan, lead trial counsel and co-managing partner at Bartko Pavia, emphasized the difficulty of retrying a case where the evidence was largely constrained: “There are no surprises, right? Especially in a case like this, where the judge is largely limiting you to the original evidence, it’s hard to come up with something new that the defendant hasn’t seen before.” He added that Walmart’s “blame-the-victim” defense strategy ultimately backfired, contributing to the substantial punitive damages.
Zest hopes the judgment will enable it to return to the sector it once helped lead. “The hope is that when Zest gets this money, they can find a way to re-inject themselves into this area of technology,” Ryan said. “But it’s challenging because their core technology was made public by Walmart.”
Read the full Arkansas Business Journal article here
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