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

How to Resolve a Trade Secret Lawsuit by Entering a Standstill Agreement

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Why litigate a case for months or years, only to arrive at a settlement that would have been possible before the case began? In many cases, neither litigant would choose this approach, but it happens quite often nonetheless. About 60 percent of trade secret cases filed in federal court in the last decade ended in …Read more

Trade Secret Misappropriation – Chinese Biotech Researcher Pleads Guilty

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The U.S. Department of Justice has secured another conviction against a Chinese national for trade secret misappropriation, which is part of a larger push to protect valuable intellectual property. Li Chen, a long time biotech researcher in a medical lab at Nationwide Children’s Hospital Research Institute in Columbus, Ohio, pled guilty to conspiracy to misappropriate …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

Proactively Protecting Your Company’s Trade Secrets from Theft by Employees

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A few years ago, the Symantec Corporation and Ponemon Institute released the results of a survey of employees working for companies in six countries, including the U.S., Brazil, China, France, Korea and United Kingdom. The results were remarkable. They should place every chief executive on notice of the risks of data security breaches her company …Read more

How Not to Protect Your Company’s Valuable Trade Secrets

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A federal district court in Illinois recently reminded all of us of how important it is to take the necessary steps to protect the proprietary information that you consider to be a trade secret before any misappropriation occurs. If you do so after the fact you may lose your ability to enjoin the thieves from …Read more

Defend Trade Secrets in Federal Court – DTSA Anniversary

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In May 2016, the United States Congress enacted the Defend Trade Secrets Act (“DTSA”) taking steps to make a “federal case” out of an area of the law that has been the domain of state law since the founding of the Republic. Whether that decision was a good one or not is yet to be …Read more