Savova, et al. v. Chen, et al. (Lawyers Weekly No. 09-030-17)
1 COMMONWEALTH OF MASSACHUSETTS SUFFOLK, so SUPERIOR COURT CIVIL ACTION NO. 2017-02790 BLS 2 GUERGANA K. SAVOVA and WIRED INFORMATICS, LLC Plaintiffs vs. PEI JUN CHEN, BRITT FITCH and MURALI NAGENDRANATH Defendants WIRED INFORMATICS, LLC, PEI JUN CHEN, BRITT FITCH And MURALI NAGENDRANATH, Plaintiffs in Counterclaim vs. GUERGANA K. SAVOVA, Defendant in Counterclaim MEMORANDUM OF DECISION AND ORDER ON DEFENDANTS’ MOTION FOR PRELIMINARY INJUNCTION This case arises from disputes among members of a limited liability company, Wired Informatics, LLC (Wired). Plaintiff Guergana Savova, who holds a 25 percent interest in Wired, instituted this action claiming that she had been ‘frozen out” and that the other Wired members, defendants Pei Jun Chen, Britt Fitch and Murali Nagendranath had engaged in actions in breach of their fiduciary duties to her and the company. Savova sought a preliminary injunction against the defendants that asked for immediate access to certain Wired records and sought to prevent the defendants from “defaming” her. On September 18, 2017, this Court denied Savova’s request for reasons stated in open court. 2 Thereafter, defendants answered the Complaint and filed their own Counterclaim alleging that Savova was assisting Wired’s competitors in breach of her fiduciary duties to them. Defendants now move for a Preliminary Injunction against Savova. After hearing and careful review of the parties’ submissions, this Court concludes that the defendants have not met their burden under Packaging Industries v. Cheney, 380 Mass. 609 (1975) for the following reasons. Wired provides natural language processing programs that assist medical professionals in extracting information from electronic medical records. As described in the pleadings, Wired’s flagship product, Invenio, uses a software system called cTAKES, which Savova together with defendant Pei Jun Chen developed while both were members of the Boston Children’s Hospital’s Informatics Program (CHIP). The cTAKES system was released under an open source Apache software license, meaning that it is available generally. Invenio, which has cTAKES as a component of it, is not generally available and is the product that Wired is seeking to commercialize. The counterclaim against Savova alleges that she is assisting competitors of Wired in making cTAKES part of their own products, in breach of her fiduciary obligations to the defendants. The request for injunctive relief is quite broad. It asks that this Court enjoin Savova from “directly or indirectly providing any assistance, of any nature whatsoever, to any entity that either competes with Wired Informatics, LLC or Wired Informatics, LLC’s Invenio product, or offers or is attempting to develop, any commercial product that provides natural language processing (‘NLP’) or machine learning (‘ML’) solutions.” The request does not attempt to identify which entities would be included in this request, or to narrow in any way the type of […]