Tag Archives: Uniform Trade Secrets Act

Four Steps to Protect Your Company’s Secrets When Employees Leave

Documentation, Forms and Policies, Hiring, Termination, Trade Secrets, Training, , , , ,

What can you do to protect your company secrets when Angela, your vice-president of sales, announces she is leaving your company and going to work for your competitor? Is there a way to keep Angela from telling her new employer all about your customers’ preferences, your company’s proprietary pricing, or the new business line you are exploring?

Truthfully, the day Angela announces her resignation is way too late to adequately protect your company’s most important secrets. Your efforts to safeguard your formulas, recipes, passwords, marketing plans, customer lists or other information you would like to keep confidential should have started before Angela was even hired.

There is no time like the present to begin taking at least four concrete actions if you value your business secrets:

  1. Physically protect your confidential information. Remember the urban myths that the secret recipe for KFC chicken or the formula for Coca-Cola were locked in a safe somewhere in company headquarters? According to Fox News, those are actual precautions taken by these companies. “The recipe [for Coca-Cola] lies in a vault in a downtown Atlanta SunTrust Bank vault and only two executives at a time have access to it.” As for KFC: “’Colonel Harlan Sanders’ Original Recipe eleven herbs and spices are inscribed in pencil on a yellowed piece of paper inside a Louisville, Kentucky safe’, says KFC spokesman Rick Maynard. ‘The safe lies inside a state-of-the-art vault that is surrounded by motion detectors, cameras and guards.’” Corporate espionage and theft of trade secrets is big business these days. These two food companies are serious about safeguarding their trade secrets. Are you as careful with yours?
    1. Do you at least have good password procedures, firewalls and cyberthreat protection, files marked “confidential”, inventories of your laptops and other equipment, and limitations on which employees have access to the keys to your business kingdom?
    2. Do you teach your new employees what information is confidential, how to protect it, remind employees frequently about their confidentiality obligations, and take immediate action if there is any breach in confidentiality?
    3. Do you prevent employees from downloading company documents onto flash drives or leaving the premises with your files?
    4. If you don’t take serious measures to protect your trade secrets, you really shouldn’t expect your current or departing employees to care either. Plus, the new Texas Uniform Trade Secrets Act doesn’t even recognize information as a trade secret unless the owner can demonstrate that the business has taken reasonable measures to keep the information secret. So without active measures to protect the secrecy of your proprietary information, you are helpless in the courts when your secrets are stolen.

Continue reading Four Steps to Protect Your Company’s Secrets When Employees Leave →

Texas Legislature Strengthens Protections of Company Trade Secrets

Documentation, Personnel Policies, , , , , ,

The Texas Legislature in its most recent session adopted the Uniform Trade Secrets Act by passing Senate Bill 953. The new law, which will go into effect September 1, 2014, will help you keep your departing employees from competing against you using your own trade secrets, which are defined as “a formula, pattern, compilation, program, device, method technique, process, financial data, or list of actual or potential customers or suppliers.” Most employers ask me to protect their customer and/or supplier lists after the employee has left the company, which is about as effective as that old saying about closing the barn door after the horse has already bolted for greener pastures.

So the recently adopted statute is good news, but you as an employer have some responsibilities too. The trade secret will only be protected if it is (1) valuable; (2) not generally known to, and not readily ascertainable by proper means from others; and (3) subject to “efforts that are reasonable under the circumstances to maintain its secrecy”. In other words, you can’t blame a former employee for using your trade secrets if you made no efforts to keep them, you know, SECRET!

To prevail under this statute, which provides for an injunction and damages, you are going to have to show that you took proactive steps to protect your confidential property, such as:

  • Limiting employee access to the trade secret so that only those with a strong “need to know” gain access;
  • Labeling files or stamping the trade secret documents with “Confidential” or “Secret” stamps;
  • Password protecting the trade secrets if located on database;
  • Installing monitoring software to record who had access to the computerized trade secret;
  • Keeping the secret under lock and key;
  • Requiring numbering and shredding of all copies of the trade secret documents;
  • Requiring employees to sign non-disclosure and confidentiality agreements in addition to a written confidentiality policy in your employee handbook;
  • Conducting periodic inspections and reviews to beef up security of trade secrets; and/or
  • Having your employees sign a non-competition agreement that meets all of the quirky requirements for valid and enforceable non-competes in Texas.

If you can demonstrate that a former employee misappropriated valuable confidential information and you took some or all of these reasonable steps to protect your data before the employee left, this statute will allow your lawyers to more easily stop your employee and his new employer from profiting from your hard work and secrets.