Page 111 of Skins Game

“No, they weren’t,” Nicole scoffed. “You know that. They’re not even close, and they sure as heck weren’t close to commercialization in March.”

He nodded. “We were misled.”

“Well, you shouldn’t have been misled. You should’ve done a site visit or asked R&D about anticipated release dates, not just taken Joe Flanagan’s word for it.”

“Did you take a vacation in early March?” Kingston asked her.

“Yeah. My college friends and I go down to Cabo every year for spring break. We never got to go while we were in college because we were studying for midterms.”

The three Last Chance guys eyed each other.

Kingston said, “My site visit was the first week of March. We met with a white guy named Bode Shultz.”

Nicole rolled her eyes so hard she thought she might sprain her eyeballs. “Bode was let go two weeks after I got back because he couldn’t do the work. He was a Level-Three Technician and a suck-up. A real sucker for people in authority. He would have said anything Joe told him to.”

Kingston leaned back in his chair and pressed his fingers into his eyes. “Sorry, guys.”

Morrissey clapped him on the shoulder but spoke to Nicole. “All right, Joe Flanagan’s fraud isn’t your fault, but now it’s all our problem. What are we going to donow?”

They were tag-teaming Nicole, and she didn’t have any backup. Selma was curled up in the chair like someone might hit her with a club, but she held her phone steady to capture everything that was said.

“Okay,” Nicole said. “No matter what has happened in the past, we need to negotiate in good faith now. So, there are no layoffs, and Kingston has to delete the specs and plans he stole off my laptop.”

Jericho raised an eyebrow. “What?”

Morrissey shook his head. “That wasn’t stealing. Trust me, I’m a lawyer.”

“No, Kingstonstolethem,” Nicole said, raising her voice because she wasright.“They weremythoughts,myplans,myideas and experimental models, and hestolethem.”

“That laptop itself and all intellectual property you produce during your contracted employment are the sole property of Sidewinder Golf, and we own Sidewinder Golf,” Kingston said evenly. “I recovered intellectual property that was not uploaded to the company’s cloud servers as your contract specifies it must be.”

“You didn’t have the right!” she gasped. Stealing them wassucha violation.

“I did, and I do. Morrissey looked over your contract and our purchase agreement with Joe Flanagan. You should retain counsel if you need the work-for-hire sections of your contract explained to you.”

“That’s not fair,” she said.

“I’m sorry, but it’s generally the way business works. We pay you a salary at risk to develop ideas, and the company then owns the patents on those ideas. If you want to go it alone, you have to start your own company.”

“Maybe I will,” she said, refusing to acknowledge that her nose was burning inside.

“Anything you wrote down, tested,or thought ofwhile under contract is Sidewinder’s property,” he said gently. “In another situation, if you quit a job and immediately started a competing company with a novel idea, your previous company would sue you for the patent, and they’d win easily. I’ve seen it happen.”

“That’s not fair,” she said, feeling her best ideas slip away.

“I’m sorry it happened that way,” Kingston said, “but they always were company property and should have been in the cloud backup. I asked you to hand them over more than once.”

“Youwere a random new sales guy.”

“I’m going to use them to save Sidewinder. They won’t be forgotten. You will be credited on the patents and marketing materials. It would be great for the company if you were the face of R&D for promo.”

Nicole shouldn’t be whining about her own petty problems, anyway. This negotiation was for all of them to save people’s jobs, not her own grievances. “In any case, this is a union negotiation. I reiterate our demands: no layoffs.”

“Wehaveto cut staff,” Kingston said, leaning forward and bracing his arms on the table.

“Fine,” Nicole said. “I’m the highest-paid employee at Sidewinder, even more than the lawyers. I’ll quit. You don’t even have to offer me a package. That’ll cut the bottom line.”

Kingston literally blinked. “You can’t.”