“As tech firms compete to attract and retain tech talent while adjusting their workforces for future business growth, employee movement has increased, making the protection of trade secrets from competitors more crucial than ever. Baker McKenzie’s international depth in handling these complex competitor trade secret disputes around the globe allow us to better advise our clients and allow them to leverage our worldwide industry experience in this field.
Continue Reading Top Strategies to Safeguard Tech Trade Secrets
Bradford Newman, Chair of North America Trade Secrets Practice, Palo AltoTrade secrets give tech companies a competitive edge in a rapidly evolving landscape, where success depends on the ability to innovate. The unauthorized acquisition, use, or disclosure of trade secrets can result in significant loss and disruption, making it essential for organizations to have robust safeguards in place to protect their trade secrets. Here, we explore clear steps organizations can take to manage and mitigate risks with a focus on trade secret identification and the role of employees in trade secret protection.
Mission Critical: Protecting Tech Trade Secrets
Fast-paced developments
The technology sector continues to experience huge transformation with emerging technologies and advancements in AI. Companies are investing heavily in developing capabilities, and new services and products. Rapid innovation and desire to be first to market, has caused trade secrets to become an increasingly preferred method of protection over other types of intellectual property regimes, such as applying for a patent, which can be costly and raise complex timing considerations. Trade secrets can protect algorithms, processes, datasets, customer lists, and more. The trade secrets of companies at the forefront of AI and other tech innovation are highly valuable.
Expanding threat landscape
Threat actors are leveraging tech advancements to steal vast amounts of company information through more sophisticated and efficient attacks. Heightened internet usage increases hacking risks from competitors, foreign governments and hacktivist groups.
AI developments currently require high computational power, concentrating progress in large tech companies. However, the competitor landscape is changing, with many start-ups and established companies building applications within the AI technology stack, alongside new players entering the AI frontier race. The demand for tech talent with the skills to drive innovation is at all-time high, making trade secret protection critical.
In the past few years, tech companies have also been especially susceptible to the public disclosure of confidential internal documents by employee activists motivated by non-monetary factors.
Legal remedies
Legal frameworks for protecting trade secrets have become more robust and varied across jurisdictions. Injunctive relief (to prevent use of trade secrets and reclaim them) is an essential tool in trade secret breach cases. Victims may also pursue financial remedies, such as damages.
Organizations should lay the groundwork to maximize their options in the event of breach. Penalties for trade secret theft include fines and imprisonment for criminal offences, and even economic sanctions. These penalties broaden the options available to victims, provide an avenue that avoids some of the practicalities of enforcement from a business point of view, and serve as a powerful deterrent.
“One factor making effective action against employee trade secret theft more difficult is that employees increasingly use personal devices or personal messaging apps to capture or transmit work-related information; companies’ ability to access employees’ personal devices and communications through personal messaging apps is limited.
Jonathan Isaacs, Head of China Employment Practice, Hong Kong“As tech firms compete to attract and retain tech talent while adjusting their workforces for future business growth, employee movement has increased, making the protection of trade secrets from competitors more crucial than ever. Baker McKenzie’s international depth in handling these complex competitor trade secret disputes around the globe allow us to better advise our clients and allow them to leverage our worldwide industry experience in this field.
Continue Reading Top Strategies to Safeguard Tech Trade Secrets
Bradford Newman, Chair of North America Trade Secrets Practice, Palo Alto
Employee activist campaigns: a new approach to protecting your company’s confidential trade secrets (Webinar)
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In 2025, the world continues to grapple with an unprecedented array of challenges. In this complex landscape, employee activists across industries increasingly make unreasonable demands which the impacted company cannot meet, while taking and leaking sensitive and confidential company trade secrets to garner internal and external sympathy for
Passage of Reintroduced California AI Bill Would Result In Onerous New Compliance Obligations For Covered Employers
Shortly after taking office, President Trump rescinded Biden’s Executive Order on Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence. Biden’s Executive Order sought to regulate the development, deployment, and governance of artificial intelligence within the US, identifying security, privacy and discrimination as particular areas of concern. Trump signed his own executive order titled “Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence,” directing his advisers to coordinate with the heads of federal agencies and departments, among others, to develop an “action plan” to “sustain and enhance America’s global AI dominance” within 180 days.
While we wait to see if and how the federal government intends to combat potential algorithmic discrimination and bias in artificial intelligence platforms and systems, a patchwork of state and local laws is emerging. Colorado’s AI Act will soon require developers and deployers of high-risk AI systems to protect against algorithmic discrimination. Similarly, New York City’s Local Law 144 imposes strict requirements on employers that use automated employment decision tools, and Illinois’ H.B. 3773 prohibits employers from using AI to engage in unlawful discrimination in recruitment and other employment decisions and requires employers to notify applicants and employees of the use of AI in employment decisions. While well-intentioned, these regulations come with substantial new, and sometimes vague, obligations for covered employers.
California is likely to add to the patchwork of AI regulation in 2025 in two significant ways. First, California Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, Chair of the Assembly Privacy and Consumer Protection Committee, plans to reintroduce a bill to protect against algorithmic discrimination by imposing extensive risk mitigation measures on covered entities. Second, the California Privacy Protection Agency’s ongoing rulemaking under the California Consumer Privacy Act will likely result in regulations restricting the use of automated decision-making technology by imposing requirements to mitigate algorithmic discrimination.Continue Reading Passage of Reintroduced California AI Bill Would Result In Onerous New Compliance Obligations For Covered Employers
Webinar: Protecting Trade Secrets in the Rapid Remote World –10 Specific Steps to Take Now
The way we work has been permanently transformed by the rapid deployment of a largely remote workforce during the shelter-in-place. Threats to companies’ most valuable confidential data have not merely increased — an entirely new set of legal and technical risks to trade secrets have emerged over the last 90 days that are fundamentally different