Short answer: a statistical study of 358 trade secret cases shows the people who steal your secrets are almost always insiders, employees and business partners, and the one thing that decides whether you can stop them is whether you took “reasonable measures” to keep the information secret. For a software
Short answer: your sales leads should belong to the company, but social media has blurred the line. Settle it in advance with a policy and employment-agreement language that says all contacts are company property, including connections made on LinkedIn, and back it up by treating the list as a trade
Short answer: the Oracle v. SAP case (a $1.3 billion jury verdict, later reduced to about $356.7 million) is a list of what not to do to a competitor: do not download more of their software than you are licensed for, do not ignore the terms of use on their
Short answer: when an employee leaves for a competitor, your ability to stop them from using what they know comes down almost entirely to what you did beforehand: marking and restricting your confidential information, running exit interviews, and using confidentiality agreements. Starwood v. Hilton shows the payoff of protecting trade
Short answer: your software pricing can be confidential, but it is not confidential automatically. Software pricing confidentiality becomes legally enforceable only when you treat the pricing as secret before it ever leaves your building, and the cleanest way to do that is a signed confidentiality agreement or NDA. I get
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