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On April 23, 2024, the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC” or “the Agency”) voted 3-2 along partisan lines in a special public meeting to adopt the “Non-Compete Clause Rule” (the “Final Rule”), which will prohibit most employee non-competes with retroactive effect, except existing non-compete provisions of “senior executives.”  The Final Rule will also…

Tips for European employers on how to protect company trade secrets.

7 to 12 years. According to an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development study, this is the average amount of time spent by an employee with any one European Union employer. However, in some countries, regions and sectors, employees move around more frequently than this, and the current COVID-19 pandemic will also have had an impact on these numbers.

In any event, if one of your employees leaves, you do not want your company’s trade secrets and other confidential information to leave with them.Continue Reading Employees may come and go. But will your trade secrets follow them?

Crowell & Moring invites you to attend the fifth installment of our Trade Secrets Webinar Series – The Revolving Door of Autonomous Vehicle Talent: Managing Employee Access to Trade Secrets & Facilitating Robust Investigation of Safety Issues, taking place on Tuesday, May 12th at 02:00 pm (EDT).

Autonomous Vehicle (“AV”) developers have been aggressively working to safeguard their vital design documents and data, and have increasingly relied on lawsuits to protect their proprietary information and to prevent such information from reaching their competitors as human talent continues to revolve through the AV industry. Given the increasing popularity of self-driving technology, AV developers should remain vigilant in protecting the trade secrets governing their autonomous vehicle programs and should be sure to implement sound policies for retrieving data upon employee departure.

Join Crowell & Moring attorneys Cheryl Falvey, Rukiya Mohamed, and Paul Mathis for a live discussion on trade secret and liability issues unique to AV developers as well as best practices.

To register, please click here.
Continue Reading Please Join Us for the Fifth Installment of our 2020 Webinar Series: The Revolving Door of Autonomous Vehicle Talent

The COVID-19 pandemic presents unique and unprecedented challenges to the ongoing need to protect confidential information and trade secrets. The massive business disruptions that enterprises of all kinds now face include (1) entire workforces forced to work remotely, accessing and using confidential information and trade secrets from home; (2) exigent circumstances created by the cessation or substantial slowing of commercial activity that may result in the disclosure of confidential information or trade secrets to third parties outside normal procedures; and (3) the off-boarding of remote employees who are accessing confidential information and trade secrets remotely.

Trade secret protection may not be the immediate priority of a business facing massive business disruptions, but taking reasonable steps now to protect the security of trade secrets and confidential information is critical to the preservation of these valuable assets when this crisis is over. Trade secret law – both federal and state – requires that a trade secret holder take reasonable measures under the circumstances to protect trade secrets.1 Reasonable measures relate not only to prevention of unauthorized disclosures, but also the minimization of the impact of any such disclosures after they occur, and these measures must be reasonable now under the current exigent circumstances.
Continue Reading Trade Secret Protection During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Pay equity continues to be one of the most significant workforce issues facing employers today. Pay equity laws aim to increase transparency into employers’ pay practices – with the ultimate goal of ensuring that employees are paid fairly regardless of demographic factors including race and gender. However, they may also require employers to release sensitive, propriety information about internal pay practices – which arguably constitute trade secrets – potentially compromising employers’ ability to remain competitive in hiring and retaining top talent. See, e.g., In re High-Tech Employee Antitrust Litig., No. 11-cv-02509, 2013 WL 163779, at *2, 5 (N.D. Cal. Jan. 15, 2013) (explaining that trade secrets include “sources of business information that might harm a litigant’s competitive standing,” including “confidential information regarding . . . recruitment strategies, policies, and procedures, [and] quantitative data concerning those topics”).
Continue Reading Trade Secret Implications For Pay Scale Provisions

Protecting trade secrets in the digital age is a modern reality, with confidential information easily stored, sent, and received electronically. Nevertheless, the most significant security breaches often arise from human behavior.

Join us for a three part webinar series on how you can get ahead of the curve to safeguard your trade secrets.

Please join…