A trade secret is essentially technology that is maintained by a company in secrecy. Importantly, though, a trade secret is only enforceable if reasonable safeguards are in place to maintain its secrecy.

While many companies believe that patents are the cornerstone of their intellectual property portfolio, in reality, patents are expensive to obtain and more expensive to defend. Worse yet, 90% of all issued patents turn out to be valueless to the owners. The landscape has become even more treacherous since the Supreme Court has recently broadened the definition of “obviousness”. This will make patents harder to enforce. To combat this, savvy, innovative companies are leveraging trade secrets as an economic and strategic component of their IP portfolio.

An established Trade Secret allows a company to:

• Prevent competitors from using the technology
• Recover damages due to misappropriation
• Prevent former employees from taking the invention to a competitor
• Prevent unlawful disclosure of the trade secret

Failure to protect your Trade Secret(s) means:

• Any competitor can freely use your technology
• Departing employees can share your ideas with other companies
• Loss of competitive advantage
• Loss of market dominance

Key tools for effective Trade Secret Management:

1. Prevent the wrong people from accessing documents

• Secure login and access control
• Clearly defined user roles and permissions

2. Alerts of suspicious activity

• Large number of document downloads, previews, etc
• Unusual access such as off-hour, high volume downloads, etc.
• Reports summarizing all user and document activity

3. Provide irrefutable proof at trial

• All documents are legally safeguarded
• Proof that documents have not been altered
• Proof of secure access to the system by authorized users

To read more about dynamic tools for innovation management see this overview.