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’s trade secrets.
Obviously, if you don’t lock your secrets up, they’re easier to steal. But the court also found that a business’s “supposedly secret information” wasn’t secret because the business itself didn’t go through the motions to behave as if it was secret. If you don’t protect your secrets, the court signaled, don’t expect a court to do it for you.
Employees walk off with customer list
The federal case in 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’s entry into the abrasives distribution market, they took files with information on Abrasic 90’s pricing, customers and suppliers. Abrasic 90 claimed the information was its own trade secrets.
Court doesn’t intervene, but give some pointers
The former employees argued, and the court agreed, the company had done “virtually nothing to protect that information to preserve its status as a trade secret” and showed an “almost total failure to adopt even fundamental and routine safeguards for the information.” Getting the help of an attorney experienced in trade secrecy laws and policies might have saved a lot of time and money.
The court supplied a long list of actions that might have helped the abrasives company’s case had it taken them.
Taken together, these measures not only protect the secrets, but support their legally enforceable status as secrets.