United States Court of Appeals For the Seventh Circuit ____________________ No. 21-3101 DM TRANS, LLC d/b/a ARRIVE LOGISTICS, Plaintiff-Appellant,

v. LINDSEY B. SCOTT, et al., Defendants-Appellees. ____________________

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division. No. 1:21-cv-03634 — Harry D. Leinenweber, Judge. ____________________

ARGUED APRIL 21, 2022 — DECIDED JUNE 28, 2022 ____________________

Before EASTERBROOK, ROVNER, and BRENNAN, Circuit Judges. BRENNAN, Circuit Judge. DM Trans, LLC (which does business as Arrive Logistics, or “Arrive”) and Traffic Tech, Inc. compete to help customers coordinate shipments of goods. Six employees at Arrive departed for Traffic Tech despite restrictive covenants. Arrive sued the six individuals and Traffic Tech for injunctive relief, claiming irreparable harm 2 No. 21-3101 because the individuals had breached their restrictive covenants and misappropriated trade secrets. The district court sided with the defendants and denied Arrive’s motion for a preliminary injunction. Because Arrive has an adequate remedy at law for each of its claimed injuries, and therefore faces no irreparable harm, we affirm the denial of injunctive relief. I A. Factual Background Arrive and Traffic Tech are rivals in the third-party logistics industry. Brokers such as Arrive and Traffic Tech serve as middlemen tasked with arranging certain details of agreements between customers (who ship goods) and carriers (who transport them). The brokers submit bids to customers, many of which solicit bids from multiple brokers. Both Arrive and Traffic Tech employ more than one hundred entry-level sales representatives in the Chicago area, and they retain many more nationwide. Those employees often contact potential customers to ask for their business. Beyond Arrive and Traffic Tech, hundreds of third-party logistics companies compete with one another just in the Chicago area. Between 2017 and 2019, each of the six individual defendants—Lindsey Scott, Frank Hernandez, Matthew Duffy, Bryan Klepperich, Jake Hoffman, and Scott Mayer— joined Arrive as an entry-level employee. Though their job titles differed slightly, a significant proportion of each individual defendant’s responsibilities was to cold call potential customers (other than Duffy, who worked on pricing). While employed at Arrive, the six individuals sought No. 21-3101 3 management-level positions and raises that Arrive was not willing to provide. All six individuals had access during their employment to Arrive’s software platform, called Accelerate. Accelerate contained information about customers, including their contact information, buying history and trends, and preferences. Arrive began to use Accelerate in March 2020, around the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Accelerate was updated continuously with new data such as shipment information and sales metrics. As time passed the same type of information remained on Accelerate, though in near-real time, new data—such as shipments and employee sales metrics—were added. Because Arrive’s employees began working remotely during the early stages of the pandemic, they used personal devices for all work-related tasks from that point forward, including tasks that involved accessing and using Accelerate. Arrive did not request that the six individuals delete company data from their personal devices upon their departure from the company, a point to which we will return. When each individual defendant joined Arrive, he or she was required to sign an employment agreement conta