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Published in Law360 on January 20, 2023. © Copyright 2023, Portfolio Media, Inc., publisher of Law360. Reprinted here with permission.
Earlier this month, President Joe Biden signed into law the Protecting American Intellectual Property Act,[1] which aims to protect U.S. intellectual property by imposing sanctions on companies and individuals involved in trade secrets theft.Continue Reading Water Cooler Talk: Trade Secret Lessons From ‘Severance’
Why is confidentiality in the workplace so important? What employee information needs to be kept confidential? In Episode 3 of the Hiring to Firing Podcast, Troutman Pepper Partners Tracey Diamond and Evan Gibbs sit down with Richard Eskew, executive vice president, general counsel, and chief privacy officer of Accolade, Inc., to discuss the hit T.V. show Squid Game and lessons learned about confidentiality agreements and restrictive covenants. Tune in to hear a lively discussion about the balance between corporate confidentiality and employee engagement, different types of corporate confidential materials (and the methods used to maintain their secrecy), the risks of employees taking such materials, as well as what companies can do to protect themselves.
Continue Reading What Can Squid Game Teach Us About Confidentiality Agreements and Restrictive Covenants?
Q: Do work-from-home arrangements create a heightened risk that company trade secrets may be exposed?
A: Without proper precautions, in many ways, “yes.”
Since the onset of the pandemic, we have observed an increased use of external storage devices by employees to save and access work-related documents. We have heard several reasons for this, but the primary one is that employees often complain that accessing large data files remotely takes considerably more time than when they access files via the network in the company’s physical offices. Thus, employees have resorted more often to using personally owned external storage devices, such as external hard drives and thumb drives to download and access company materials.Continue Reading Protecting Trade Secrets in a Work-From-Home World
In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series of posts, we began the discussion of what the Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA), enacted in May 2016, really means for employers in defending their trade secrets. In particular, we addressed some of the “good” the DTSA offers for employers, including: (1) a clear path to federal court, (2) ex parte seizure orders and (3) international application. In Part 3, we addressed the bad — four potential downsides of the DTSA for employers, including mandatory disclosure of whistleblower protections. In this final Part 4, we outline questions left unanswered by the DTSA which are worth watching for future developments.
Continue Reading The Defend Trade Secrets Act: What Does it Really Mean for Employers? The Good, the Bad and the Ambiguous, Part 4
Last Fall’s election, where so much was said about hacked emails, should serve as a reminder to employers that cyber security is of the utmost important. Cyber crime continues to rise across the globe. In some European countries it even outpaces traditional crime. A single data breach can cost a company millions of dollars in lost revenue, fines, and corrective action, not to mention the damages to its reputation and brand loyalty. So what are the biggest cyber threats and how can businesses best defend against them?
Continue Reading Cyber Security & Employees
In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series of posts, we began the discussion of what the Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA), enacted in May 2016, really means for employers in defending their trade secrets. In particular, we addressed some of the “good” the DTSA offers for employers, including: (1) a clear path to federal court, (2) ex parte seizure orders and (3) international application. In this Part 3, we address the bad — four potential downsides of the DTSA for employers.
Continue Reading The Defend Trade Secrets Act: What Does it Really Mean for Employers? The Good, the Bad and the Ambiguous, Part 3
In Part 1 of this post, we began the discussion of what the Defend Trade Secrets Act, passed in May 2016, really means for employers in defending their trade secrets. In particular, Part 1 addressed some of the “good” the DTSA offers for employers, particularly: (1) a clear path to federal court, (2) consistency in application, and (3) ex parte seizure orders. In this Part 2, we address the rest of the good — five more positive benefits of the DTSA for employers.
Continue Reading The Defend Trade Secrets Act: What Does it Really Mean for Employers? The Good, the Bad and the Ambiguous, Part 2
A Gartner Inc. Executive Program survey predicts that 50% of companies will require employees to provide their own devices for their jobs by 2017. If your employees use their own mobile phones to do work, it’s quite possible your company’s confidential information walks out the door every night. This raises cybersecurity concerns for a company’s intellectual property and confidential trade secrets. The need to secure a company’s protected information must also be balanced with an employee’s right to privacy. However, technology continues to push the expectation of worker productivity to wearable technologies (Apple Watch, anyone?). Does your company employ a BYOD policy? Are you confident that your company’s information is secure?
Continue Reading Is Your Company’s Confidential Information Leaving at 5 p.m.?
Online forums where anyone can post comments, reviews, or opinions about a company are growing in popularity. As a result, employers are finding postings by former employees who may have left on “bad” terms and now share their unhappy feelings with the world. Often such postings – while annoying and potentially embarrassing – are well within an employee’s rights. Companies need to remember that the former employee will likely soon grow tired of the cyber smear campaign, and such posts do not often cause meaningful damages (particularly the type that can be proven in court). Additionally, where such posts are on sites like Twitter or Facebook, the daily volume of postings means that any bothersome posts get moved down the feed pretty quickly. Most of the time the employer’s best bet is to follow the advice of Disney’s “Frozen” and just “Let it Go.”
Continue Reading Cyber Threats and Online Defamation: Options When Former Employees Won’t Let Go
Georgia’s new statutory law of restrictive covenants became effective more than three years ago, on May 11, 2011. The significance of the new law cannot be overstated. Prior to the new law, Georgia Courts were required to follow sometimes arcane rules of construction that frequently resulted in covenants being invalidated in their entirety based on what seemed to be trivial defects.
Continue Reading Remember “5/11”
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