Yes, Yes, Yes... A Great Trade Secrets Post

Excuse the Meg Ryan/When Harry Met Sally imitation, but I read the following in Shhh….it’s my trade secret. from Wisconsin Business Law and Litigation and could not resist:

When new businesses begin hiring, they are driven clarify to extreme degrees that no employee should bring in either ideas, documents, etc from former employers to use at the new job. They may also inquire into any non-compete or non-disclosure agreements the employee signed with a prior employers and, contrarily, may have employees sign new non-compete and non-disclosure agreements to protect the company’s own trade secrets.

There is no doubt that trade secrets are valuable, but they require constant tending, like a plant.

I have been trying to get certain ideas across about trade secrets for the past year and there they are in two neat paragraphs. Beautiful.

The post also makes a good point for what I call trade secret audits:

The primary problem businesses run into with trade secret law is the second prong - reasonable efforts to maintain secrecy of the trade secret. Courts judge reasonableness based on the nature of the secret so a business generally has no way to predict what protection measures will be sufficient in the court’s eyes.

Having counsel review your methods for protecting your trade secrets may not be a magic bullet but I do think it will help prove sufficiency to a court.