Guarding Trade Secrets Without a Perimeter: Remote Work and the Cloud

53 questions on guarding trade secrets without a perimeter, answered and cited by the UpLaw editorial team.

• Can a company recover trade secrets from an employee's personal phone or laptop after they leave?
• Can a company rely on non-competes to protect its trade secrets now that the FTC rule is gone?
• Can a company rely on the inevitable disclosure doctrine?
• Can a company sue a remote employee in the state where the company is located?
• Can an employee disclose a trade secret by pasting proprietary code into an AI tool?
• Can an open source license destroy a trade secret?
• Can employee monitoring designed to protect trade secrets create its own legal exposure?
• Does a VPN protect trade secrets from a departing employee?
• Does remote work automatically weaken trade secret protection?
• Does the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act cover an employee who copies files she was allowed to see?
• How do employees actually exfiltrate trade secrets in a remote work environment?
• How does a company avoid disclosing its trade secrets during the litigation to protect them?
• How does distributed work erode the measures companies traditionally relied on?
• How does the Economic Espionage Act relate to civil trade secret claims?
• How does the Uniform Trade Secrets Act relate to the DTSA?
• How fast must a company move when it suspects a departing employee took data?
• How should a confidentiality agreement be modernized for remote work?
• Is a confidentiality agreement enough on its own to make information a trade secret?
• Is possession of a former employer's confidential information enough to prove misappropriation?
• Is reasonableness judged against conditions when the policy was written or current conditions?
• Is reverse engineering a trade secret unlawful?
• What are the privacy limits on forensically examining a personal device?
• What are the two requirements for information to qualify as a trade secret?
• What can forensic review of a departing employee's device reveal?
• What did DM Trans v. Scott teach about personal devices?
• What did Yellowfin Yachts v. Barker Boatworks hold about reasonable measures?
• What does a company that successfully proves reasonable measures actually do?
• What does a trade secret program for a distributed workforce look like in practice?
• What does effective trade secret offboarding look like?
• What factors do courts weigh in deciding whether a company took reasonable measures?
• What happened to the FTC's non-compete ban?
• What happens if a company shares its trade secrets with a third party?
• What is access creep and why is it a legal problem?
• What is a trade secret audit and why does it matter legally?
• What is spoliation and why is it a distinct danger in trade secret cases?
• What is the Defend Trade Secrets Act?
• What is the DTSA civil seizure remedy?
• What is the DTSA whistleblower immunity, and what does an employer lose by omitting the notice?
• What is the inevitable disclosure doctrine?
• What is the statute of limitations for a DTSA claim?
• What remedies are available for trade secret misappropriation?
• What should a BYOD policy include to protect trade secrets?
• What should a cloud vendor contract include to preserve trade secret protection?
• What should a company do at onboarding to protect trade secrets?
• What should an exit interview accomplish for trade secret purposes?
• What technical controls do courts credit as reasonable measures?
• Why can't technical controls alone protect trade secrets?
• Why does consistent enforcement of security policies matter to a trade secret case?
• Why does prevention matter more for trade secrets than for other intellectual property?
• Why does the timing of signing a confidentiality agreement matter?
• Why do trade secret defendants attack the reasonable measures element?
• Why is the offboarding period the highest-risk moment for trade secrets?
• Why must a trade secret plaintiff identify its secrets with particularity?