Faccenda Chicken Case Study

In the case of Faccenda Chicken Ltd v Fowler and others; Fowler v Faccenda Chicken Ltd - [1986] 1 All ER 617 it was stated that plaintiff company was involved in the business of selling fresh chicken from refrigerator van which travelled through specific paths within a specific area. Each and every salesman will received sales details about the clients’ names and addresses, overall limits of the routes, amount and quality of goods sold and prices charged. After that, the defendant operated his business in the same location, same path, served the same types of clients as the plaintiff. Five of the defendant’s colleague had left the plaintiff and joined the defendant 's employment. None of the colleague is bound by a contract that prevents them from offering service immediately

Not only this, there was no indication that Faccenda Chicken Ltd given any command that the any information regarding sales or prices was be treated as confidential information. From this, we can conclude that the nature of the information itself is not classified as trade secret. Hence, the employee did not breach the duty of confidentiality. Besides that,according to the case of Robb v Green [1895] 2 QB 315, 59 JP 695 which the defendant hired by claimant as a manager of his business, the defendant secretly copied the customer name and addresses from his master book list. The employee had copied his master books list during working period and with the intention of stealing his master client contact for the benefits of himself thus, there is a breach of duty of confidentiality which the customer list is cooperate confidential information that was not supposed to disclose to public or personal used. Consequently, after his service with the plaintiff had come to the end, the defendant used the customer list and set up a similar business of his personal account. The defendant’s conduct was a breach of contract in terms of which plaintiff was allowed to damages