Orbit, a San Francisco-based HR and workforce management platform, filed suit against its direct competitor Nexum on April 4th, alleging trade secret theft, computer fraud, and civil racketeering. Orbit claims Nexum paid Connor Hale — a former Orbit Director of Enterprise Sales — $7,500 per month through a consulting entity to leak confidential internal data over fourteen months, including Orbit's enterprise pricing model, its top-fifty client list with contract renewal windows, and internal product roadmap memos. Nexum has characterized the payments as compensation for legitimate market research through its vendor relationship with Hale Consulting LLC. The suit was triggered by a sting Orbit's security team ran in February. A fabricated internal initiative called Project Meridian was seeded into a restricted Slack channel accessible to eight people, including Hale. Thirty days later, language from the Meridian documents appeared, nearly verbatim, in internal Nexum communications obtained through a separate whistleblower disclosure. Orbit's counsel filed the following week. Partial recovery of a Signal thread from a subpoenaed device — four messages, forty-seven others wiped — shows an exchange between Hale and an unverified contact directing him to obtain specific client data. You are interviewing Sylvia Marsh, 46, Nexum's Vice President of Strategy, who approved the payments to Hale Consulting LLC and has agreed to speak without counsel.