Protecting trade secrets is a bit more difficult than protecting your business’s patents and copyrights — after all, trade secrets are, by definition, secret. While you can identify and document your trade secrets within your organization, you can’t publicly outline them like you would in a patent. Instead, you must take measures to keep the information protected.
If you are forced to turn to litigation to protect your trade secrets, courts in Texas are much more likely to side with you if they can see you’ve gone to great lengths to protect the information from outsiders. Here’s how to create and implement a plan to protect your trade secrets — and your business as a whole.
Creating a plan to protect your trade secrets can be overwhelming, especially if you haven’t done so before. Fortunately, you don’t have to develop that plan alone. The right business lawyer can help you design and implement measures to reduce the risk of trade secrets’ getting into the wrong hands.
Identify and Document Your Trade Secrets
You don’t have to publish and identify your trade secrets outside of your company as you would with a copyright. However, it’s essential to have them identified and documented within company records. If you bring a complaint against a business or individual for stealing or using your trade secrets, you must be able to prove to the court that those trade secrets were yours in the first place. The court will want to see that you’ve documented the trade secrets, but it will also want to make sure you’ve taken ongoing precautions to protect them. If your trade secrets are documented and only accessible to a limited number of employees, you’ll be off to a great start.
Implement Strict Confidentiality Measures
Keeping your trade secrets truly safe requires a multi-pronged approach. The exact confidentiality measures you take will depend on your industry, but these are some common ones:
Use Caution with Vendors and Outsourced Manufacturing
Many companies with valuable secrets to protect also maintain working relationships with other organizations. To minimize the risk that one of those organizations will get hold of a secret, consider using different vendors to supply different components and ingredients. If you use the same vendor for everything, it might be able to reverse-engineer your product.
Keep Data Safe
Use multiple safeguards to protect sensitive information. For example, you might keep hard copies of trade secrets in an access-restricted room. Employees should have to log in to a database to see restricted information, and that information should be accessible only on a need-to-know basis.
Conduct Regular Assessments
New trade secrets can develop over time, so owners and officers should take the time to periodically review materials for new confidential information.
Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs)
It’s important to take precautions that limit access to trade secrets, but some employees (particularly those very high up in your company) will invariably learn some of those secrets along the way. For these employees — and those who might stumble upon trade secrets by accident — you should have non-disclosure agreements (NDAs). These legally binding agreements forbid employees from discussing any confidential information they learn on the job. However, you can’t put just anything in an NDA and expect it to be legally binding. Our team can help you create NDAs that will stand up in court.
Creating an NDA that is both comprehensive and legally enforceable is more complex than it sounds, but the right business lawyer can help. Give Weisblatt Law Firm a call at (713) 666-1981 or reach out online for a free consultation.
Employee Education and Training
Protection Starts with Education
Not all instances of trade secret sharing are malicious. If your employees don’t understand trade secrets or how they work, they might accidentally share valuable information. To minimize the risk of this, you should implement comprehensive, ongoing training for employees at every level. Training can include topics like these:
- Understanding trade secrets
- Data security
- Importance of not sharing photos/videos taken at work
- What to do if an employee sees suspicious activity.
While training should be thorough, it also should be concise and engaging enough to hold an employee’s attention. You may want to partner with an organization that specializes in creating customized employee training material.
Exit Interviews and Agreements
You don’t only have to protect your trade secrets from current employees. When an employee leaves the company, make sure you have an exit interview where they return all confidential information. During this interview, you also can terminate their access to employee email accounts, company databases, and other potential sources of confidential information.
Make sure the departing employee understands that they may not disseminate any of your company’s secret information. They must thoroughly grasp the consequences of doing so. The exit interview is a perfect time to ask them to sign an NDA or a similar business contract.
Monitor and Enforce Your Rights
The laws around trade secrets are constantly evolving. If you want to keep yourself as protected as possible, you should keep your finger on the pulse of these laws and any new developments surrounding them. That can be a challenge if you don’t have a legal background, but the right business lawyer can play a critical role in monitoring relevant laws, alerting you to important changes, and helping you adjust your plans accordingly.
Develop a Trade Secret Protection Plan
Let Our Team Help You Protect Your Livelihood
Figuring out the best way to protect your trade secrets can be a challenge. You can’t just ask competitors how they protect their own secrets. You also must ensure that your employees can use those secrets to create and sell products. At Weisblatt Law Firm, we’ve helped countless companies like yours keep valuable secrets secure.
The time to secure your trade secrets is now. Don’t wait until you’re facing potential litigation to do so! Get in touch with the lawyers at Weisblatt Law Firm at (713) 666-1981 for a free phone consultation.
Attorney Andrew Weisblatt
Mr. Weisblatt has practiced continuously since becoming licensed in 1992 and has represented businesses ranging in size from one person start-up ventures to multi-national corporations employing hundreds of people in multiple countries. From 2005 through 2009 Mr. Weisblatt was in-house counsel and chief operating officer of a multi-national corporation in the steel products industry. That in-house position provided valuable insight into how businesses work and what they actually need from their lawyers – both in-house and outside counsel. Attorney Bio
