The first afternoon session I attended was on trade secret updates presented by Washington D.C. based attorney Dan Westman works in Washington D.C. One of the first points mentioned was that government contractors tend to have protecting trade secrets down – before even going into briefing rooms in some companies, you have to give up all your technology (and non-technology) devices!
Another key point was that preliminary injunctions aren’t always easy to get. In fact, several of the cases he brought up really surprised me – it seems that bringing an external hard drive to a company to copy documents before you offer your resignation would be a sure sign that something was up! However, as he said, judges are human too and may be giving benefit of doubt to individuals rather than companies in trade secret cases.
Several additional points I took away are if you are good attorney, you can pick apart any trade secret case. This is common sense but is worth repeating; lesson I learned is that at some point someone is going to ripe apart an agreement I write no matter how good I am. Another one was that you need to make sure any company you represent is following the body of best practices to protect trade secrets that is out there – I am going to be going to NIST and the FCC websites to review these for sure. Finally, and again this is common sense but worth repeating, is companies need to develop policies for what is appropriate in their workplaces as more individuals bring their own personal technology devices to the workplace.
