10 Tips to Protect Confidential Information When Considering Selling Your Company

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So you’re thinking about selling your company because you’ve finally received an offer you think is reflective of all the hard work you and your partners and employees invested over all those years. It’s inevitable that you will have to share some confidential information about your company with the potential buyers during the course of …Read more

7 Questions to Answer Before You Sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement

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Before your company considers sharing its technology or other proprietary information with a potential strategic or commercial partner, you will want to ensure that the information is kept secret and cannot be used for any unauthorized purpose. This is where a non-disclosure agreement (“NDA”) may be useful to you. An NDA is a legally binding …Read more

Top 10 Mistakes to Avoid Managing Your Company’s Trade Secrets

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Whether you’re running a newly minted start-up or leading an established corporation, genuine trade secrets will almost always provide your company with a competitive edge in the marketplace under both federal and state law. But you must handle them properly. Unfortunately, that edge can deteriorate, or vanish entirely, if your company makes one or more …Read more

Grand Jury Indicts Chinese Energy Company and Affiliates on Trade Secret Charges

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Another new indictment alleging misappropriation of U.S. oil and gas trade secrets by a Chinese energy company, its U.S. based affiliate, and an executive officer was recently handed down by the U.S. Department of Justice. It is another example in a recent string of trade secret charges involving Chinese companies and Chinese nationals operating in …Read more

Why Conduct an Intellectual Property Audit

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As we discussed in our recent post How to Conduct Intellectual Property Audits, your company’s intellectual property (IP) is among its most important and valuable assets. The goals of an audit of that IP are to: 1) determine what IP your company owns, and 2) develop a strategy to effectively use and manage those assets …Read more

How to Conduct Intellectual Property Audits to Protect and Maximize the Value of Your Company’s IP

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Intellectual property – which include patents, copyrights, trade secrets and trademarks – is among your company’s most important and valuable assets. It defines your brand and gives you a competitive advantage in the marketplace. Whatever goods or services your company may offer, protecting your IP portfolio should be among your company’s most important business goals. …Read more

Protecting Trade Secrets – Recent High Profile Trade Secret Enforcement Cases

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Companies often consider trade secrets to be their crown jewels, particularly in Silicon Valley. In the digital age, where copying vast amounts of data and transmitting it via the Internet is as easy as one click, protecting trade secrets has become ever more challenging for highly competitive technology companies. Losing control over your trade secrets …Read more

Detecting Early Signs of Trade Secret Theft by Competitors

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Trade secrets are frequently associated with a company’s most valuable and profitable products and services. Maintaining control of critical confidential information is often essential to a growing a company’s revenue stream, enhancing product development, moving into new markets, and continuing to grow and succeed. Along with restricting access to trade secret information to a need-to-know …Read more

What to Do When an Employee Steals Company Trade Secrets

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If an employee of your company stole an item of tangible company property when he left to start another job – like a car, or computer, or airplane – would you just let it go? Of course not. Yet, studies show that 50 percent of departing employees take confidential business information from their employer before …Read more

How to Decide if You Should File a Lawsuit Against Your Former Employee for Trade Secret Theft

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Now that you know with certainty that a former employee has left your company for a competitor, and in the process, has stolen your company’s valuable trade secrets, you need to decide whether to file a lawsuit to recapture the stolen intellectual property and recover your damages from him and any other individual(s) involved. The …Read more