Trade Secrets
Clear, strategic advice on identifying, protecting and harnessing your trade secrets.
We protect: trade secrets
Most businesses are aware of the value of securing registered forms of intellectual property, like patents, trade marks and designs.
However, one lesser-known, often-overlooked asset that can significantly strengthen your market position is the protection of trade secrets.
A trade secret is any confidential business information, known only to its owner, that provides a competitive edge. Advances in trade secret laws have made protecting and managing this form of IP as valuable as ever.
Our IP specialists can help you implement a commercially-driven strategy to identify, protect, exploit and enforce your trade secrets and commercial information.
Protect your commercial edge with trade secrets
Any commercially-valuable information can constitute a trade secret, such as recipes, formulas, algorithms, code, customer lists, financial data and proprietary manufacturing processes.
Despite not being formally registered, trade secrets can be some of your most valuable IP assets. They have no registration costs and can last indefinitely, provided secrecy is maintained.
If a dispute occurs, the question of whether a trade secret exists is decided by the courts when an action is brought for misappropriation.
In many jurisdictions, the assessment involves identifying whether the owner took ‘reasonable steps’ to keep information secret. These measures can include non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), confidentiality training and secure storage protocols.
Businesses and innovators should ensure that their systems effectively record and manage trade secrets. By blending legal and technical expertise, we can help you build such a framework.
Safeguarding your business-critical know-how
In today’s digital and data-driven environment, collaboration can bring tremendous rewards, but it also introduces risk.
Licensing arrangements, joint ventures or supplier agreements often mean confidential information needs to be shared.
Effective management of trade secrets allows you to enter these partnerships with confidence, knowing that your commercially-valuable methodologies and techniques are protected. This also provides a safeguard if, for example, an employee joins a competitor.
We can help you to establish or strengthen secure databases to store and categorise your trade secrets.
We can also work with your teams to emphasise the importance of confidentiality, and review your existing precautions to ensure your information stays fully protected.
A leading trade secrets IP law firm
Managing trade secrets effectively requires a strong understanding of the commercial landscape, including risks and opportunities specific to your sector.
With professional backgrounds in industry, our specialists understand the technology and the legal context.
From AI and software to chemistry and life sciences, we have extensive experience helping businesses of all sizes and sectors to develop robust trade secrets policies and frameworks.
Established in 1975, we are highly ranked in the world’s leading IP directories. This includes IP STARS, IAM Strategy 300, WIPR Leaders, Chambers & Partners, Legal 500 and Lexology Index.
FAQ #
What is a trade secret?
A trade secret is information that has economic value to its owner and which is not known to the public. It must be kept confidential for it to remain valuable. Examples of trade secrets include recipes, formulas, manufacturing processes and customer lists.
How are trade secrets protected?
Trade secrets can be protected legally through the use of trade secret laws. These laws vary from country to country but generally provide for civil and criminal remedies against any party that misappropriates or discloses a trade secret without authorisation. Companies can protect their trade secrets by ensuring that employees know which information/data is considered to be confidential (e.g. customer lists, manufacturing techniques, etc.) and/or taking physical precautions such as using password-protected databases or locked filing cabinets. Additionally, if discussions with an outside party are going to involve any confidential information, then that can be legally protected by using a non-disclosure agreement.
Can a trade secret be patented?
Yes, under certain circumstances. If the trade secret meets the criteria for patentability—namely that it is novel, useful and non-obvious—then it can be patented. However, once a trade secret has been made public through the patent application process, it then loses its status as a trade secret and cannot be protected as such.
What are the benefits of trade secret protection?
The main benefit of trade secret protection is that it can provide indefinite protection for valuable information without having to go through the expensive and time-consuming process of obtaining a patent. Additionally, trade secrets can be licensed to other parties for a fee or other consideration, which can be an important source of revenue for the company. Finally, trade secret protection allows companies to keep their competitive edge by preventing others from gaining access to valuable information.
Meet our trade secrets experts #
Trade secrets & IP strategy: expert insights #
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