Coquitlam woman wins fight against U.S. tech firm’s bid to compel testimony in trade secrets case

A Coquitlam woman has successfully fought off an attempt by a U.S. technology company to force her to provide testimony and documents in a high-stakes patent and trade secrets lawsuit unfolding in New York, following a recent B.C. Supreme Court decision.

On June 10, Justice Richard Fowler rejected a petition by California-based Hayden AI Technologies Inc., which had asked the court to enforce a request from a New York federal court seeking evidence from Coquitlam resident Debbie Kerr.

“This has the hallmarks of a fishing expedition,” Fowler said. “The evidence filed on this petition falls woefully short of supporting an order in these terms.”

Hayden alleges Safe Fleet LLC, its Coquitlam-based subsidiary Seon Design Seon Inc., and several executives infringed its patents and misappropriated trade secrets to develop a competing product.

The underlying patents relate on Hayden’s Automated Bus Lane Enforcement (ABLE) system, technology that uses cameras and artificial intelligence to detect vehicles illegally driving or parking in dedicated bus lanes.

Among the allegations is that company officials improperly obtained Hayden’s confidential investor presentation, known as its Series A Investor Deck, which contained market and pricing information.

Kerr worked at Seon from 2016 to 2024, primarily serving as an executive assistant to senior Safe Fleet’s vice-president Tom Gill and later also supported vice-president Daniel Pulskamp.

The company argued she possessed relevant information related to allegations that competitors improperly obtained and used Hayden’s confidential business information.

Hayden argued Kerr was a “central figure” who distributed the presentation, coordinated meetings and helped collect information about the company. The firm also claimed her testimony had become more important after her former work email account was deleted following her departure from Safe Fleet.

But Justice Fowler was skeptical of those claims, and ruled Hayden failed to establish that Kerr could provide relevant evidence or that any information she possessed could not be obtained from other sources.

He found the evidence showed Kerr’s role was largely administrative, involving scheduling meetings, forwarding documents at the direction of her supervisors and conducting occasional public-source research on competitors.

“There is a modicum of evidence that Ms. Kerr reviewed the presentation and may have extracted some information from it that she then forwarded to other U.S. Defendants,” Fowler said. “I see no evidence that she did anything more with the presentation.”

He further rejected Hayden’s characterization of Kerr as playing a central role in updating executives on the company’s activities.

“Other than forwarding the presentation at the request of her employer, there is no evidence that Ms. Kerr played a central role doing anything.”

The judge described some of Hayden’s assertions as “bald” and unsupported by evidence.

Fowler also said any relevant evidence could likely be obtained from the executives who directed Kerr’s work, noting there’s no indication key executives had been deposed or otherwise questioned in the U.S. proceedings.

While Hayden argued Kerr’s deleted email account made her testimony uniquely important, Fowler found the company had already recovered many of her emails from the accounts of other Safe Fleet employees.

Foreign court orders seeking evidence from British Columbians are not automatically enforced. While Canadian courts generally respect requests from foreign jurisdictions, judges must still assess whether the requested evidence is relevant, necessary and unavailable elsewhere.

Fowler said Hayden’s original request – seeking all documents and communications concerning Hayden, the lawsuit and Hayden’s investor materials – far too broad.