LimitNone LLC, a small start-up company has filed a lawsuit against Google, Inc. for deceptive business practices and trade secret infringement, claiming that Google’s business software unit copied LimitNone’s tool for migrating customers from Microsoft Outlook software to Gmail and claimed it as Google's.

The complaint alleges that Google initially was promoting LimitNone’s software tool for migrating Microsoft Outlook customers to Gmail, but then copied their idea and began to compete with LimitNone with the same tool. LimitNone met with Google in March 2007 to build a tool it called "gMove" for moving e-mail, address books and calendars of corporate customers from Microsoft’s Outlook software into Gmail. Apparently Google had been unable to build such a tool.

LimitNone then entered into a confidentiality agreement with Google to share trade secrets of its migration tool with Google’s key employees and did so. Late in 2007 LimitNone claims that Google told them that it was entering the market directly with the migration tool without LimitNone due to the enormity of the business opportunity.

Google then introduced a free e-mail migration tool called "Google Email Uploader" earlier this year, which LimitNone’s action claims is nearly identical to gMove and “operates under a similar conceptual design."

LimitNone has hired big gun law firm, Kelley, Drye & Warren, who had previously sued Google in a trademark case over its online advertising practices.  The lead attorney in the case, David Rammelt, said in a phone interview that LimitNone had been told by Google that 50 million subscribers were "just too big to come from someone else." He claims that that a simple calculation of the lost revenue for LimitNone based on those numbers "very quickly gets you up to about $950 million."