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Podcast: Protecting Trade Secrets Before It's Too Late

With employees regularly bringing smartphones and other electronic devices to work, the line between what is personal and work-related had become increasingly blurred. And that can make an employer's attempts to protect its proprietary information more troublesome than in the past. So what can businesses do to prevent valuable trade secrets from walking out the door with departing employees?

On this podcast, Los Angeles employment attorney Dan Forman provides some answers and discusses the remedies employers have to protect themselves, including those under the federal Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA) which strengthen the hand of employers. Forman heads the Unfair Competition and Trade Secret Practice Group at Carothers, DiSante and Freudenberger.

Protecting Trade Secrets Before It's Too Late

April 25, 2017

Forman advises employers to be as specific as possible in policies about what they consider to be confidential and a trade secret. This can be accomplished, he says, through handbooks, agreements, computer usage policies and actual training of employees.

Vigilance is especially important in this age of Wikileaks, Forman notes, with more employees claiming they need to use confidential information to blow the whistle on their employer. But he asserts that whistleblowers still may not resort to "self-help" in taking documents to support their claims without going through discovery.

Additional Resources

How to Protect Information Under the Defend Trade Secrets Act

Keep Trade Secrets Confidential

Confidential and Proprietary Information Policy

Transcript