Casenote: JN Dairies Limited v (1) Johal Dairies Limited (2) Gurbir Singh [2009] EWHC 1331

In JN Dairies Limited v (1) Johal Dairies Limited (2) Gurbir Singh [2009] EWHC 1331 (Ch, Birmingham), 12 June 2009 HHJ David Cooke ruled that there was an actionable breach of confidence by the defendants concerning the claimant’s invoices. The dispute was between two competing wholesale dairy companies. The judge found that the second defendant, a former employee of the claimant, had taken the invoices, and the first defendant company had made use of them or the information in them to approach and negotiate with the claimant’s customers. The judge applied the three-step test in Coco v A N Clark (Engineers) Ltd [1969] RPC 41, as every judge faced with a breach of confidence does, and decided that the information had the necessary quality of confidence and that the defendant had breached his duty of confidence. However, the judge did not did not find the categorisation of information in Faccenda Chicken Ltd v Fowler [1987] Ch 177 helpful to the circumstances of this case, because the information had not been communicated: it had been “stolen”, or perhaps taken would be a better word. Anyway, the judge considered that the information in the claimant’s invoices about quantities of goods bought by a particular customer and the prices charged to him was information which possessed the necessary degree of confidentiality, and that the defendants were well aware that it was confidential when they took it. That satisfied the second element in the Coco Trinity. This was a trial of a preliminary issue, to determine whether there was an actionable breach, so perhaps we’ll hear more of it in the future although there’s not much to argue about now.

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