{"id":246,"date":"2019-10-20T09:19:49","date_gmt":"2019-10-20T09:19:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/https:\/\/fire.h50.us\/~rehalaw\/?p=246"},"modified":"2022-05-12T09:20:50","modified_gmt":"2022-05-12T09:20:50","slug":"court-says-act-secretive-to-protect-trade-secrets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fire.h50.us\/~rehalaw\/blog\/2019\/10\/court-says-act-secretive-to-protect-trade-secrets\/","title":{"rendered":"Court says act secretive to protect trade secrets"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A recent court decision was a useful reminder of a less-than-obvious but possibly important reason for your business to take proactive, early and consistent steps to protect your business\u2019s trade secrets.<\/p>\n<p>Obviously, if you don\u2019t lock your secrets up, they\u2019re easier to steal. But the court also found that a business\u2019s \u201csupposedly secret information\u201d wasn\u2019t secret because the business itself didn\u2019t go through the motions to behave as if it was secret. If you don\u2019t protect your secrets, the court signaled, don\u2019t expect a court to do it for you.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Employees walk off with customer list<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.natlawreview.com\/article\/cautionary-tale-don-t-wait-until-there-problem-to-protect-your-trade-secrets\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">federal case<\/a>\u00a0in the Northern District of Illinois involved high-ranking employees of Abrasic 90, a distributor of abrasive products. When they left the company to spearhead another company\u2019s entry into the abrasives distribution market, they took files with information on Abrasic 90\u2019s pricing, customers and suppliers. Abrasic 90 claimed the information was its own trade secrets.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Court doesn\u2019t intervene, but give some pointers<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The former employees argued, and the court agreed, the company had done \u201cvirtually nothing to protect that information to preserve its status as a trade secret\u201d and showed an \u201calmost total failure to adopt even fundamental and routine safeguards for the information.\u201d Getting the help of an\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/https:\/\/fire.h50.us\/~rehalaw\/practice-areas\/noncompete-trade-secrets\/\">attorney experienced in trade secrecy<\/a>\u00a0laws and policies might have saved a lot of time and money.<\/p>\n<p>The court supplied a long list of actions that might have helped the abrasives company\u2019s case had it taken them.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Provide access to the data on a \u201cneed to know\u201d basis.<\/li>\n<li>Require a signed non-disclosure agreement before anyone, including suppliers and distributors, can access the data.<\/li>\n<li>Warn departing employees of their continuing obligations to protect the data and make them return or destroy their copies.<\/li>\n<li>Provide secrecy policies that are clear and useful, and train or educate employees about data secrecy and how to fulfill their obligations.<\/li>\n<li>Password-protect and encrypt the data, label it as secret and don\u2019t publicly disclose the data.<\/li>\n<li>Hire personnel who are qualified to manage confidential data for company\u2019s data systems.<\/li>\n<li>Use measures to protect confidential data that are different from those used to protect data that isn\u2019t confidential.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Taken together, these measures not only protect the secrets, but support their legally enforceable status as secrets.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A recent court decision was a useful reminder of a less-than-obvious but possibly important reason for your business to take proactive, early and consistent steps to protect your business\u2019s trade secrets. Obviously, if you don\u2019t lock your secrets up, they\u2019re easier to steal. But the court also found that a business\u2019s \u201csupposedly secret information\u201d wasn\u2019t&#8230;  <a href=\"https:\/\/fire.h50.us\/~rehalaw\/blog\/2019\/10\/court-says-act-secretive-to-protect-trade-secrets\/\" class=\"more-link\" title=\"Read Court says act secretive to protect trade secrets\">Read more &raquo;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.7 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Court says act secretive to protect trade secrets - Reha Goodwin Caras LLP<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"noindex, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Court says act secretive to protect trade secrets - Reha Goodwin Caras LLP\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A recent court decision was a useful reminder of a less-than-obvious but possibly important reason for your business to take proactive, early and consistent steps to protect your business\u2019s trade secrets. 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