A Bay Area medical device company is accused in a new lawsuit of spreading lies about a rival, including that it “hired good-looking female sales representatives to sleep with doctors in order to sell products.”
Cutera, a Brisbane firm making lasers and other equipment for “body sculpting,” skin treatments, and removal of lesions, hair and tattoos, falsely told influential doctors that its competitor Lutronic Aesthetics was engaging in several unsavory practices, Lutronic claimed in the lawsuit filed last week.
Massachusetts-based Lutronic alleged the lies followed a trade secrets dispute that began in 2020, over Cutera employees resigning and going to work for Lutronic.
“The working environment at Cutera is permeated with misogyny, vulgarity and, among some employees, illegal drug use,” the lawsuit filed Thursday in San Mateo County Superior Court claimed. “After the departure of the employees … Cutera’s workplace grew even more toxic by also becoming permeated by an obsessive desire to exact revenge against and destroy Lutronic Aesthetics and the ex-employees who left to join Lutronic Aesthetics.”
Cutera said it planned to “vigorously defend itself” against the lawsuit’s claims.
Lutronic in its lawsuit claimed that Cutera, in addition to telling “key opinion leader” doctors that Lutronic was deploying attractive sales representatives to seduce physicians, also told those doctors Lutronic was handing out free equipment in return for endorsements. That lie was intended to undermine the credibility of doctors who endorsed Lutronic’s products, and make it harder for Lutronic to sell to other doctors who would not want to pay asking price for equipment they thought their competitors were getting free, the lawsuit alleged.
Cutera, whose marketing materials include references to “Hollywood’s hottest bodies” and “fast, reliable” fat reduction, also falsely told doctors that Lutronic had no U.S. service technicians, that it was a failing business, that it manufactured its products illegally, and that some sales and marketing employees who left Cutera had committed crimes that would land them in prison, the lawsuit claimed.
In 2020, Cutera sued Lutronic in U.S. District Court in Sacramento, claiming it had hired away Cutera’s executive VP of sales, who then allegedly lured three other Cutera employees to Lutronic. The VP, with Lutronic’s support, accessed Cutera’s trade secrets as Lutronic schemed to “raid key members of Cutera’s sales organization” and pilfer additional proprietary information, Cutera alleged in the lawsuit. Cutera also claimed Lutronic had hired away a consultant who shared Cutera’s trade secrets with the company in a bid to create a “copy-cat” of a “muscle-sculpting product” Lutronic had just released in the U.S.
Lutronic, denying its rival’s claims, said in a 2020 court filing that it had required every former Cutera employee it hired to sign an agreement not to access, disclose or use any of Cutera’s proprietary information.
However, Cutera pointed out Friday that the judge in the case found that the employees who left Cutera for Lutronic had “copied over material potentially containing trade secrets to an external drive, iCloud account, Dropbox account or emailed them externally, and deleted certain contents of the Cutera laptops, just prior to or soon after they left Cutera,” according to a March 2020 court filing. Judge Kimberly Mueller found she had “good cause” to grant Cutera’s request for a restraining order barring Lutronic from using or disseminating any proprietary Cutera information it may have.
That case continues.
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