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Special Report
Rohm & Haas case is endless legal battle
Intellectual-property fight between scientist and firm far from over.
By Bob Fernandez
Inquirer Staff Writer
Chemist Mandy Lin
Chemist Mandy Lin
» More images
When scientist Mandy Lin went for her annual performance review in 1997, she was anticipating a high five from her Rohm & Haas supervisor and a promotion.
That year, she had made discoveries in her monomers research lab that she believed were groundbreaking. Indeed, they would lead to nine patents for a new way of making acrylics, and she was eager to be recognized.
That\'s not what happened.
If a monkey makes a catalyst work, her supervisor asked, should the monkey get a promotion?
Lin, who is Chinese, took the comment as a racial insult. She filed a discrimination claim, and two years later, Rohm & Haas paid her $100,000 in a settlement. She also resigned from the company.
But the battle between researcher and chemical giant was far from over. Seven years later - a long time for such cases - the enmity between the parties is just as bitter, and a legal conflict between them drags on through court, running up millions of dollars in attorneys\' fees and fines.
Disclosed for the first time last month at the request of The Inquirer, the voluminous Rohm & Haas v. Dr. Manhua Mandy Lin trade-secrets case reads like a legal street brawl, replete with head butts, ear bites, and punches below the belt.
Lin\'s attorneys claim pervasive fraud by Rohm & Haas in its pursuit of its former employee. Rohm & Haas says Lin stole from the company and is stubborn, loony and maybe hallucinatory.
Lin, one of the first scientists hired for a cutting-edge research team, had wide access to Rohm & Haas\' labs and trade secrets and could have walked off with information about technology worth millions of dollars, the Philadelphia company says. If the information gets out, it could threaten the economic well-being of Rohm & Haas and its 16,000 employees.
Lin said she did not steal or disclose any trade secrets; Rohm & Haas just doesn\'t want her as an independent scientist and competitor. It is trying to crush her financially, hounding her from lab to lab with court orders, she says.
Broadly speaking, the messy clash is part of a surge in intellectual-property litigation in the United States over the last two decades, as new products and innovation have driven corporate success in global markets.
Companies go to great lengths to protect innovation, even though technology often catches up with trade secrets in a year or two. Attorneys say Rohm & Haas v. Lin is an exceedingly long trade-secrets case.
Courts are now being asked to draw lines, experts say, between employee rights and their ability to move between jobs and the rights of intellectual-property owners.
The case is a cautionary tale: For employees, do not leave a corporation on a sour note. For companies, remember: A discriminatory remark can reverberate for a long, long time.
Lin\'s background
Lin, 50, is a short and trim woman with bobbed black hair and a nervous smile. When she talks of the case, her face darkens with defiance. Why are they so interested in what a monkey would do? she asked sarcastically.
Lin was raised in Fujian Province, the daughter of two teachers, and sent at 17 to the countryside during Mao\'s Cultural Revolution for reeducation as a barefoot doctor - in her case, a barefoot dentist.
In the 1980s, she won a scholarship to State University of New York at Stony Brook on Long Island, where she earned a doctorate in organic chemistry. She then followed her husband, who obtained a job at Merck & Co. Inc., to the Philadelphia area. In 1989, she went to work as a researcher for Rohm & Haas Co., of Spring House.
The events leading up to the trade-secrets case began, innocently enough, Lin said, with a 1997 focus group intended to build camaraderie.
A survey taken the year before had uncovered discontent, and Lin and 20 other Asian employees were asked to discuss their concerns. They were told, Lin said, that they would be protected from reprisal.
So Lin told the focus group leader that she had not been consulted when Rohm & Haas outsourced research on her project to China, even though she could have helped with the language.
When her managers learned of her comments, she said, they took away her team-leader duties.
A company spokesman responded that Lin has made numerous allegations against her supervisors, our attorneys and others over the past 10 years that we feel are without merit.
Back in the lab, she had been researching how to convert propane into acrylic acid, a liquid monomer central to Rohm & Haas\' business. In the 1950s, the company pioneered waterborne acrylics, which produce 50 percent of its global sales of about $8.5 billion. Acrylics give household paint color retention, stain resistance and durability.
By mid-1997, her new method showed promise. She quintupled the amount of acrylic acid obtained from propane, making it commercially viable, she said.
Using propane instead of propylene, the current raw material for acrylic acid, could save the company about $55 million a year, said James Vouros, a Rohm & Haas director of intellectual property. He described Lin\'s work as a piece of the puzzle in the conversion to propane.
After the focus group, Lin said, her supervisors began ignoring her. When she told two vice presidents about the treatment, one sent her e-mail to the diversity office. The reference to the monkey should not have been made, an internal report obtained by The Inquirer stated. The supervisor regretted the comment, it said, and apologized.
Lin was not mollified. She filed a discrimination complaint in January 1999 with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which found in her favor. That November, she reached a settlement with the company. In the agreement, though denying wrongdoing, Rohm & Haas agreed to pay Lin $100,000, promote her, raise her salary to $76,000 a year, and give her a technical award for her achievements, even though she was leaving. She hung the award plaque in her office window for two weeks before departing, she said.
The agreement allowed her to publish scientific articles. It also permitted Rohm & Haas to review Lin\'s publications for trade-secret disclosures and stipulated that Lin could not research acrylic acid for one year. After her departure, she assisted the company as it filed for a patent on her discovery. She was paid $3,000 for her work.
Her first public presentation, on propane and acrylic acid, was a speech at the American Chemical Society meeting in San Francisco four months into the agreement, in March 2000.
Rohm & Haas approved 19 of the 20 slides for the presentation, Lin said. The 20th slide, she said, contained publicly available information from a European patent filing. Calling the information confidential and proprietary, Rohm & Haas said she could not use the slide.
That presentation would come to trigger seven years of litigation.
Two Rohm & Haas employees watched Lin\'s 20-slide presentation. In June 2000, the company filed suit, partly, according to court documents, because it feared Lin would disclose more information in a scientific paper.
Testimony begins
In nine days of testimony at the Montgomery County Courthouse in early 2001, Rohm & Haas presented a strong case to Judge Bernard A. Moore. The company said Lin stole hundreds of confidential documents and a $1,500 reference manual when she resigned.
It said that her slide presentation used 1997 data on her research - only 1996, or earlier, data were to be allowed - and revealed four trade secrets.
Henry Foley, a chemistry professor and now dean at Pennsylvania State University, testified as an expert witness for the company that the trade secrets were not public.
Moore issued a preliminary injunction in June 2001, which said that Lin had to get approval from Rohm & Haas for any scientific publication until a trial, which was expected within a year or two. It also said she could not disclose trade secrets. A Superior Court ruling upheld the preliminary injunction.
After the ruling, Lin\'s attorney, Hugh Hutchison, focused on what he called discrepancies in the company\'s case.
Because Lin was helping the company file for a patent on her discoveries, she needed her research data, and that, he said, is why she took them.
As for the trade secrets, he said, Rohm & Haas later conceded in court documents that Lin had used 1996 data in a crucial slide, not 1997 data. A researcher testified one way about the secrets in court, but contradicted that testimony in a patent filing, Hutchison said in court documents.
Rohm & Haas said in legal filings that it had testimony but no written proof of the existence of the four trade secrets at the time of Lin\'s presentation.
Hutchison argues that the company contrived the trade secrets, which he calls transparent trash. They\'re not trade secrets. They\'re nothing.
He asked Moore to revisit the issue that launched the case, but the judge declined. Outside his courtroom, Moore said of the suit: It\'s not appropriate for me to discuss it.
Lin\'s technology firm
Without a job, Lin ran through her settlement money. So she formed EverNu Technology L.L.C.
In January 2002, more than a year after Lin\'s noncompete agreement had expired, EverNu sought a federal grant. She proposed researching a nontoxic process for manufacturing the plastics chemical methacrylic acid, which goes into Plexiglas. In May 2002, Lin got her grant.
EverNu has received other research grants, a total of $2.6 million, according to Small Business Administration records.
The plastics chemical is not mentioned in Lin\'s noncompete agreement, the lawsuit, or Moore\'s preliminary injunction.
Rohm & Haas says Lin worked in 1999 in the same department as a scientist researching the chemical. She was on an e-mail list exchanging project information, it said. The company also says Lin may have stolen documents on the chemical.
And so, the company opened another front in the legal battle.
In 2003, three years after Lin\'s slide presentation, Rohm & Haas asked Lin and EverNu for all documents, data and financial information related to federal grant proposals. At the time, she was working in collaboration with a chemistry professor at Temple University.
Lin and EverNu fought the court orders, saying the company wanted to steal her ideas. Her attorneys said Rohm & Haas had a history of harassing Lin. The request for information should be limited, they argued, to what Lin could have stolen.
Moore told her and her company to produce the documents. Lin proposed having neutral experts evaluate her grant proposal to see if it contained Rohm & Haas trade secrets. Rohm & Haas rejected the offer, saying that identifying its trade secrets could take years.
Because they flouted court orders to produce the information, Moore in June 2005 fined Lin and EverNu $100 a day each.
Last summer, Rohm & Haas moved to collect the fines, freezing EverNu\'s bank account for two weeks. EverNu posted a bond to unfreeze the money.
Attacks from both sides
From the court filings, it\'s clear that both sides are attacking each other any way they can.
Rohm & Haas has questioned how Lin can afford $1 million in legal fees and has suggested she\'s misusing her federal grants. Lin denies this.
The company declines to discuss its own legal fees on the case. Hutchison said in court in late 2003 that Rohm & Haas had spent $1 million by then. Court documents show that its lead attorney, Mari Gursky Shaw, charges $450 an hour.
Rohm & Haas has threatened to contact the Department of Energy so it can begin an investigation into EverNu, getting Moore\'s approval to provide the agency with documents from the sealed case. So far, the company has not contacted the Energy Department, although it\'s still an option, Vouros, the Rohm & Haas patent attorney, said.
Lin would welcome an investigation by the Energy Department, Hutchison said.
Days before the case file was disclosed to The Inquirer, Rohm & Haas ted a 2003 company-paid psychiatric report on Lin. Describing some of its contents, Shaw wrote to Moore that Lin apparently feels she has mythical powers or a special mission in life that others do not understand or accept.
Hutchison called the move obscene, saying Rohm & Haas inserted the report for the newspaper to see. Vouros said the report was ted to support its legal position.
John Chesney, the lawyer who represents EverNu Technology, has filed a document titled EverNu\'s Compendium of False, Fraudulent, and Misleading Claims, Evidence and Arguments Made by Rohm & Haas and its Counsel Mari Shaw.
It lists 17 items, organized graphically for easy reading. On one side of each page is a claim by Rohm & Haas; on the other, EverNu states what it says is evidence to the contrary.
Among the items are the contention that two Rohm & Haas employees falsely testified to support the company\'s case.
Vouros said the accusations were outrageous attacks. I don\'t know what their motivation is.
Five years into the case, Hutchison asked Moore to remove himself from the case for bias. He said the judge failed to realize that Rohm & Haas might want to rip off Lin\'s research ideas. Moore denied the request.
\'Technology robbery\'
In January, 6 1/2 years since the suit was filed, Rohm & Haas obtained 712 pages of EverNu\'s documents from Temple, including, Lin said, her research proposal on the plastics chemical. She said the quest for the Temple documents amounted to technology robbery. Rohm & Haas said Lin appeared to be pursuing a research path on the plastics chemical similar to its own.
Last month, Rohm & Haas said in court that it wanted documents on Lin\'s research at Villanova University, where she leases lab space. Lin said there were no documents there.
Rohm & Haas recently offered to settle the case if it were allowed free access to EverNu\'s future patents on the plastics chemical, which it believes would be based on its research.
Lin plans to reject the offer. She intends to license the technology, but to a Rohm & Haas competitor.
Marc S. Adler, the company\'s chief intellectual-property counsel, said Rohm & Haas wanted Lin to move on and work on something different.
Lin refuses.
And the case snarls on, like Dickens\' fictional Jarndyce and Jarndyce, litigated so long that all parties lost sight of the original cause.
Rohm & Haas v. Lin now stretches to about 650 docket entries - 10,000 pages of petitions, orders, arguments, interrogatories, opinions, appeals and trans.
And there is no trial in sight.
Contact staff writer Bob Fernandez at 215-854-5897 or bob.fernandez@phillynews.com.
Rohm & Haas case is endless legal battle
Intellectual-property fight between scientist and firm far from over.
By Bob Fernandez
Inquirer Staff Writer
Chemist Mandy Lin
Chemist Mandy Lin
» More images
When scientist Mandy Lin went for her annual performance review in 1997, she was anticipating a high five from her Rohm & Haas supervisor and a promotion.
That year, she had made discoveries in her monomers research lab that she believed were groundbreaking. Indeed, they would lead to nine patents for a new way of making acrylics, and she was eager to be recognized.
That\'s not what happened.
If a monkey makes a catalyst work, her supervisor asked, should the monkey get a promotion?
Lin, who is Chinese, took the comment as a racial insult. She filed a discrimination claim, and two years later, Rohm & Haas paid her $100,000 in a settlement. She also resigned from the company.
But the battle between researcher and chemical giant was far from over. Seven years later - a long time for such cases - the enmity between the parties is just as bitter, and a legal conflict between them drags on through court, running up millions of dollars in attorneys\' fees and fines.
Disclosed for the first time last month at the request of The Inquirer, the voluminous Rohm & Haas v. Dr. Manhua Mandy Lin trade-secrets case reads like a legal street brawl, replete with head butts, ear bites, and punches below the belt.
Lin\'s attorneys claim pervasive fraud by Rohm & Haas in its pursuit of its former employee. Rohm & Haas says Lin stole from the company and is stubborn, loony and maybe hallucinatory.
Lin, one of the first scientists hired for a cutting-edge research team, had wide access to Rohm & Haas\' labs and trade secrets and could have walked off with information about technology worth millions of dollars, the Philadelphia company says. If the information gets out, it could threaten the economic well-being of Rohm & Haas and its 16,000 employees.
Lin said she did not steal or disclose any trade secrets; Rohm & Haas just doesn\'t want her as an independent scientist and competitor. It is trying to crush her financially, hounding her from lab to lab with court orders, she says.
Broadly speaking, the messy clash is part of a surge in intellectual-property litigation in the United States over the last two decades, as new products and innovation have driven corporate success in global markets.
Companies go to great lengths to protect innovation, even though technology often catches up with trade secrets in a year or two. Attorneys say Rohm & Haas v. Lin is an exceedingly long trade-secrets case.
Courts are now being asked to draw lines, experts say, between employee rights and their ability to move between jobs and the rights of intellectual-property owners.
The case is a cautionary tale: For employees, do not leave a corporation on a sour note. For companies, remember: A discriminatory remark can reverberate for a long, long time.
Lin\'s background
Lin, 50, is a short and trim woman with bobbed black hair and a nervous smile. When she talks of the case, her face darkens with defiance. Why are they so interested in what a monkey would do? she asked sarcastically.
Lin was raised in Fujian Province, the daughter of two teachers, and sent at 17 to the countryside during Mao\'s Cultural Revolution for reeducation as a barefoot doctor - in her case, a barefoot dentist.
In the 1980s, she won a scholarship to State University of New York at Stony Brook on Long Island, where she earned a doctorate in organic chemistry. She then followed her husband, who obtained a job at Merck & Co. Inc., to the Philadelphia area. In 1989, she went to work as a researcher for Rohm & Haas Co., of Spring House.
The events leading up to the trade-secrets case began, innocently enough, Lin said, with a 1997 focus group intended to build camaraderie.
A survey taken the year before had uncovered discontent, and Lin and 20 other Asian employees were asked to discuss their concerns. They were told, Lin said, that they would be protected from reprisal.
So Lin told the focus group leader that she had not been consulted when Rohm & Haas outsourced research on her project to China, even though she could have helped with the language.
When her managers learned of her comments, she said, they took away her team-leader duties.
A company spokesman responded that Lin has made numerous allegations against her supervisors, our attorneys and others over the past 10 years that we feel are without merit.
Back in the lab, she had been researching how to convert propane into acrylic acid, a liquid monomer central to Rohm & Haas\' business. In the 1950s, the company pioneered waterborne acrylics, which produce 50 percent of its global sales of about $8.5 billion. Acrylics give household paint color retention, stain resistance and durability.
By mid-1997, her new method showed promise. She quintupled the amount of acrylic acid obtained from propane, making it commercially viable, she said.
Using propane instead of propylene, the current raw material for acrylic acid, could save the company about $55 million a year, said James Vouros, a Rohm & Haas director of intellectual property. He described Lin\'s work as a piece of the puzzle in the conversion to propane.
After the focus group, Lin said, her supervisors began ignoring her. When she told two vice presidents about the treatment, one sent her e-mail to the diversity office. The reference to the monkey should not have been made, an internal report obtained by The Inquirer stated. The supervisor regretted the comment, it said, and apologized.
Lin was not mollified. She filed a discrimination complaint in January 1999 with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which found in her favor. That November, she reached a settlement with the company. In the agreement, though denying wrongdoing, Rohm & Haas agreed to pay Lin $100,000, promote her, raise her salary to $76,000 a year, and give her a technical award for her achievements, even though she was leaving. She hung the award plaque in her office window for two weeks before departing, she said.
The agreement allowed her to publish scientific articles. It also permitted Rohm & Haas to review Lin\'s publications for trade-secret disclosures and stipulated that Lin could not research acrylic acid for one year. After her departure, she assisted the company as it filed for a patent on her discovery. She was paid $3,000 for her work.
Her first public presentation, on propane and acrylic acid, was a speech at the American Chemical Society meeting in San Francisco four months into the agreement, in March 2000.
Rohm & Haas approved 19 of the 20 slides for the presentation, Lin said. The 20th slide, she said, contained publicly available information from a European patent filing. Calling the information confidential and proprietary, Rohm & Haas said she could not use the slide.
That presentation would come to trigger seven years of litigation.
Two Rohm & Haas employees watched Lin\'s 20-slide presentation. In June 2000, the company filed suit, partly, according to court documents, because it feared Lin would disclose more information in a scientific paper.
Testimony begins
In nine days of testimony at the Montgomery County Courthouse in early 2001, Rohm & Haas presented a strong case to Judge Bernard A. Moore. The company said Lin stole hundreds of confidential documents and a $1,500 reference manual when she resigned.
It said that her slide presentation used 1997 data on her research - only 1996, or earlier, data were to be allowed - and revealed four trade secrets.
Henry Foley, a chemistry professor and now dean at Pennsylvania State University, testified as an expert witness for the company that the trade secrets were not public.
Moore issued a preliminary injunction in June 2001, which said that Lin had to get approval from Rohm & Haas for any scientific publication until a trial, which was expected within a year or two. It also said she could not disclose trade secrets. A Superior Court ruling upheld the preliminary injunction.
After the ruling, Lin\'s attorney, Hugh Hutchison, focused on what he called discrepancies in the company\'s case.
Because Lin was helping the company file for a patent on her discoveries, she needed her research data, and that, he said, is why she took them.
As for the trade secrets, he said, Rohm & Haas later conceded in court documents that Lin had used 1996 data in a crucial slide, not 1997 data. A researcher testified one way about the secrets in court, but contradicted that testimony in a patent filing, Hutchison said in court documents.
Rohm & Haas said in legal filings that it had testimony but no written proof of the existence of the four trade secrets at the time of Lin\'s presentation.
Hutchison argues that the company contrived the trade secrets, which he calls transparent trash. They\'re not trade secrets. They\'re nothing.
He asked Moore to revisit the issue that launched the case, but the judge declined. Outside his courtroom, Moore said of the suit: It\'s not appropriate for me to discuss it.
Lin\'s technology firm
Without a job, Lin ran through her settlement money. So she formed EverNu Technology L.L.C.
In January 2002, more than a year after Lin\'s noncompete agreement had expired, EverNu sought a federal grant. She proposed researching a nontoxic process for manufacturing the plastics chemical methacrylic acid, which goes into Plexiglas. In May 2002, Lin got her grant.
EverNu has received other research grants, a total of $2.6 million, according to Small Business Administration records.
The plastics chemical is not mentioned in Lin\'s noncompete agreement, the lawsuit, or Moore\'s preliminary injunction.
Rohm & Haas says Lin worked in 1999 in the same department as a scientist researching the chemical. She was on an e-mail list exchanging project information, it said. The company also says Lin may have stolen documents on the chemical.
And so, the company opened another front in the legal battle.
In 2003, three years after Lin\'s slide presentation, Rohm & Haas asked Lin and EverNu for all documents, data and financial information related to federal grant proposals. At the time, she was working in collaboration with a chemistry professor at Temple University.
Lin and EverNu fought the court orders, saying the company wanted to steal her ideas. Her attorneys said Rohm & Haas had a history of harassing Lin. The request for information should be limited, they argued, to what Lin could have stolen.
Moore told her and her company to produce the documents. Lin proposed having neutral experts evaluate her grant proposal to see if it contained Rohm & Haas trade secrets. Rohm & Haas rejected the offer, saying that identifying its trade secrets could take years.
Because they flouted court orders to produce the information, Moore in June 2005 fined Lin and EverNu $100 a day each.
Last summer, Rohm & Haas moved to collect the fines, freezing EverNu\'s bank account for two weeks. EverNu posted a bond to unfreeze the money.
Attacks from both sides
From the court filings, it\'s clear that both sides are attacking each other any way they can.
Rohm & Haas has questioned how Lin can afford $1 million in legal fees and has suggested she\'s misusing her federal grants. Lin denies this.
The company declines to discuss its own legal fees on the case. Hutchison said in court in late 2003 that Rohm & Haas had spent $1 million by then. Court documents show that its lead attorney, Mari Gursky Shaw, charges $450 an hour.
Rohm & Haas has threatened to contact the Department of Energy so it can begin an investigation into EverNu, getting Moore\'s approval to provide the agency with documents from the sealed case. So far, the company has not contacted the Energy Department, although it\'s still an option, Vouros, the Rohm & Haas patent attorney, said.
Lin would welcome an investigation by the Energy Department, Hutchison said.
Days before the case file was disclosed to The Inquirer, Rohm & Haas ted a 2003 company-paid psychiatric report on Lin. Describing some of its contents, Shaw wrote to Moore that Lin apparently feels she has mythical powers or a special mission in life that others do not understand or accept.
Hutchison called the move obscene, saying Rohm & Haas inserted the report for the newspaper to see. Vouros said the report was ted to support its legal position.
John Chesney, the lawyer who represents EverNu Technology, has filed a document titled EverNu\'s Compendium of False, Fraudulent, and Misleading Claims, Evidence and Arguments Made by Rohm & Haas and its Counsel Mari Shaw.
It lists 17 items, organized graphically for easy reading. On one side of each page is a claim by Rohm & Haas; on the other, EverNu states what it says is evidence to the contrary.
Among the items are the contention that two Rohm & Haas employees falsely testified to support the company\'s case.
Vouros said the accusations were outrageous attacks. I don\'t know what their motivation is.
Five years into the case, Hutchison asked Moore to remove himself from the case for bias. He said the judge failed to realize that Rohm & Haas might want to rip off Lin\'s research ideas. Moore denied the request.
\'Technology robbery\'
In January, 6 1/2 years since the suit was filed, Rohm & Haas obtained 712 pages of EverNu\'s documents from Temple, including, Lin said, her research proposal on the plastics chemical. She said the quest for the Temple documents amounted to technology robbery. Rohm & Haas said Lin appeared to be pursuing a research path on the plastics chemical similar to its own.
Last month, Rohm & Haas said in court that it wanted documents on Lin\'s research at Villanova University, where she leases lab space. Lin said there were no documents there.
Rohm & Haas recently offered to settle the case if it were allowed free access to EverNu\'s future patents on the plastics chemical, which it believes would be based on its research.
Lin plans to reject the offer. She intends to license the technology, but to a Rohm & Haas competitor.
Marc S. Adler, the company\'s chief intellectual-property counsel, said Rohm & Haas wanted Lin to move on and work on something different.
Lin refuses.
And the case snarls on, like Dickens\' fictional Jarndyce and Jarndyce, litigated so long that all parties lost sight of the original cause.
Rohm & Haas v. Lin now stretches to about 650 docket entries - 10,000 pages of petitions, orders, arguments, interrogatories, opinions, appeals and trans.
And there is no trial in sight.
Contact staff writer Bob Fernandez at 215-854-5897 or bob.fernandez@phillynews.com.
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