A former employee at a Louisville-based tech startup has been taken to court by her former employer, according to documents filed May 24 in Jefferson County Circuit Court.
The plaintiff, Virtual Peaker, filed a complaint against Shadea Mitchell, the defendant, for alleged acts committed between the time that Mitchell announced her resignation to Virtual Peaker and accepted a new position with GE Digital LLC (also listed as a defendant) in early March.
Mitchell previously served as the director of client marketing at Virtual Peaker for 14 months, according to her LinkedIn profile. Her current title is listed as a customer success manager at GE Grid Solutions.
The complaint alleges Mitchell violated a noncompete agreement that she signed in 2018, which stated she would not work for a company that “directly or indirectly competes with the business of Virtual Peaker within the United States.”
As such, Virtual Peaker’s attorney, Tim Droel — of Droel, PLLC, based out of the Minneapolis metro area — sent GE Digital a cease-and-desist letter March 16, five days after the company had terminated Mitchell’s employment. On April 3, Michael Dubus, the executive counsel for labor and employment at GE Digital, sent a reply to Droel saying that he had received the letter.
On May 25, the plaintiff filed a motion for temporary injunction to go into effect on May 30 that would require Mitchell to refrain from “directly or indirectly destroying, erasing, or otherwise making available for future proceedings in this matter” or disclosing Virtual Peaker’s “confidential, proprietary, and trade secret to anyone.”
It also required Mitchell to return any of Virtual Peaker’s confidential or proprietary materials and prohibited her from talking to Virtual Peaker employees or working from GE Digital or any other direct or indirect competitor of Virtual Peaker until March 10, 2024.
A hearing on the issue, with Jefferson Circuit Court Judge Mitch Perry presiding, will take place in Aug. 9. The above items also constitute part of the relief sought by the plaintiff — in addition to several monetary awards of unknown amounts for damages caused by Mitchell’s alleged actions — including the “forfeiture of compensation previously paid to her by Virtual Peaker in periods during which she was employed by Virtual Peaker and breached her respective duties.”
Mitchell’s attorney, Laura Landenwich, of Louisville firm Adams, Landenwich and Lay PLLC, told me that the defense maintains the noncompete agreement is unenforceable under Kentucky law, which requires such agreements to be both reasonable in temporal scope and geographic scope.
The defense team has until Monday, June 19, to present a counterclaim. Landenwich said they planned to file a wage discrimination claim and a claim for abuse of process before then.
Virtual Peaker runs its technology on a cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) digital platform that has the ability to integrate with Internet of Things (IoT) devices to enable utility companies to manage residential electricity.
Although its main offices are listed as being at 825 E. Market St. in Louisville, it also has employees in several other states such as Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Florida, Texas and Oregon. In 2022, we reported that the company had the third largest investment for an area startup that year after raising $16.6 million in a Series A round.
GE Digital — based out of San Ramon, California, in the Bay Area — provides grid automation and systems and software as part of its array of services through GE Grid Solutions. It should be noted that Louisville-based GE Appliances has no connection — other than branding — to GE Digital or any of other General Electric (NYSE: GE) properties after it was purchased by China-based Haier in 2016.
In the complaint, Virtual Peaker claims Mitchell created a “backdoor” account on the company’s administration app and took at least one notebook that belongs to Virtual Peaker founder and CEO Bill Burke that contained various forms of proprietary information.
Both of these acts were believed to have taken place between when she gave her resignation at 10:45 a.m. March 9 and when she was escorted out of the building at 2:23 p.m. that same day. Mitchell later received a "for cause" termination letter March 11, after the company discovered the account and missing notebook.
In the complaint, Virtual Peaker says Mitchell admitted to her "wrongful and unlawful" conduct, providing a text messages she sent to other employees and a letter as evidence.
“I wanted to take a shot back, to poke back, hissing into the void. And my impulse was to burn things, break things, take action and fight back somehow. I was stupid and blinded by rage and ego. And then, I tried to check myself but it was too late. I knew the damage was done and the keyboard logged my dumb attempt at spiteful humor, a middle finger to the notion I wanted sabotage. I knew that they would see it," Mitchell allegedly wrote in the letter titled "A Gift."
Virtual Peaker alleges in the complaint that Mitchell obtained salary information of other employees through Burke's notebooks, which she didn't have permission to view.
I spoke with Droel, but he declined to comment on the case.
He did, though, reference portions of two documents, one of which was the 10th item of the affidavit from Heather Droel, the vice president of human resources at Virtual Peaker, who Tim Droel confirmed is his spouse: “Ms. Mitchell has never had authorized access to Virtual Peaker’s employees’ personnel files, including, but not limited to, employees’ salaries.”
Tim Droel also referred to the last paragraph of the response that Landenwich wrote to him on March 30 that includes that it is Mitchell’s preference “that both parties simply move onto more useful endeavors.”
Jay Inman is serving as GE Digital’s lead attorney in this case. He is based out of the Lexington, Kentucky, offices of Littler Mendelson P.C. An attempt to reach Inman for this story was unsuccessful — as was an attempt to reach a representative from GE Digital’s legal counsel team.
