Transcript

If you decide you don’t want to pursue a patent, either it’s too expensive at this point or it’s not the right kind of technology for a patent protection, you might decide to keep it as a trade secret. A trade secret or patent protection is important information how to produce a product, some little trick in the processing. It could be a customer list. Trade secret could be business plans. It can be a lot of things. And it’s an asset of your company that you need to protect.  

Now when we say you have to protect your trade secrets we really mean it. The courts will not be sympathetic to you if you accuse someone of stealing your trade secrets if you did nothing to protect or if you didn’t do enough to protect it. You have to have a policy in place and procedures in place to protect your trade secrets. And have in mind there’s no government grant, no registration.  You don’t file a secret paper with the government to register your trade secrets.  You simply know them, and you hope that other people don’t. If other people come across those trade secrets on their own, if they invent the same process, if they come up with the same customer list, they are free to use it. There’s nothing you can do about that. You can stop them if they misappropriate your trade secret by talking to your employees and getting them to divulge secrets that they shouldn’t be divulging. That’s wrong. You can stop them. If they come up with their ideas on their own, I’m afraid they are free to use those ideas.  

If somebody leaves your company and begins to misappropriate your trade secrets you’re going to want to act on that. So what do you need? You need records that show you had that concept in place, in mind, recognize that it was a trade secret, that it was an asset of the company, and took steps to protect it. Now taking steps to protect it, that’s probably going to be a general description of what the company does to protect its trade secrets. Locking doors and having robust IT protections, and keeping papers off desks when visitors are in the area, all of that. A judge is actually going to want to know that you took steps, affirmative, real, concrete steps to protect your trade secrets. If you did, then the judge will help you protect them. If you treated your trade secrets glibly and didn’t really bother to protect them, the judge is going to be unsympathetic.  
Hopefully you’ve been diligent in your employee intake and in your employment policies. All of your employees know not to use trade secrets learned from another employer before they came to you.  Good. That’s all great. Nevertheless, the day may come when you’re accused of having misappropriated someone’s trade secrets.  If that happens, dig in, take a look, do a study, see whether or not there really is a problem.  There very well may not be. It’s easy to make allegations. It’s harder to prove them. But you don’t want to be on the wrong side of an actual trade secret finding. Do your homework when the allegation is made, take it seriously. You might very well be fine. If you’re not fine, remedial action. Do what you need to do to get the trade secrets out of your product. Or maybe take a license. It’s possible that the trade secret owner would be happy to have the revenue if you’re willing to pay a license fee to use that trade secret.  

So with everything else you have going on, paying attention to your intellectual property’s strategy is going to be crucial to your business success.