We handle both the traditional issues of unfair competition and restrictive covenants as well as the emerging areas of cyber-theft of trade secrets and electronic espionage.
Our approach is unique and client-centered. Our noncompete and trade secrets team uses an integrated, multi-disciplinary, cross-industry approach, because protecting corporate assets including trade secrets, key personnel, and valuable customer relationships requires a broad legal and investigative focus.
Our first objective is protecting corporate assets that our client companies entrust to their employees, including their confidential information, trade secrets, and valuable relationships with customers and key employees. We work with clients to implement comprehensive "corporate protection programs" and best practices to review or audit, and then enhance, their existing means of protecting such corporate assets. Complementing these legal services are the considerable resources of Troutman Pepper's affiliated team of attorneys and non-attorney professionals, who are dedicated to ensuring business integrity, security, compliance, and due diligence.
We use a coordinated multi-disciplinary approach to assess in-house technologies, existing agreements, and current practices and determine what steps can be taken to enhance methodologies and documentation, and to create complementary policies, procedures, and tracking devices to better protect valuable corporate assets. We also design policies and procedures to help ensure that employees do not use social media to transmit confidential information in contravention of law or corporate interests.
Our second objective is to counsel clients on hiring employees from competitors, while respecting the enforceable terms of any employment agreements and such employees' common law obligations. We "pre-litigate" cases to maximize the likelihood of lifting out key employees from other companies in a manner that increases the likelihood that our clients will remain free from costly legal challenges or, if sued, will prevail in court.
Our third objective is successfully litigating non-compete and trade secret disputes that cannot be resolved without the need for court intervention. Our attorneys have decades of experience in enforcing non-competition, customer restriction, and confidentiality clauses, as well as preventing corporate raiding and misappropriation of trade secrets – whether suing for breach of contract or an employee's fiduciary duty of loyalty, unfair competition, employee piracy, violation of trade secrets laws, tortious interference, misappropriation, violation of civil and criminal computer abuse, and cyber- and corporate espionage laws, and other statutory and common law causes of action.
All too often, companies that bring lawsuits to restrain the misuse of their trade secrets by former employees proceed without a "smoking gun," and leave court with meaningless injunctive relief.
Our team is staffed and equipped with experienced litigators from across disciplines to seek immediate relief in the courts when our clients' businesses are threatened by unfair competition or illicit activities.
Complementing our litigators is eMerge, our eDiscovery and litigation technology subsidiary, led by counsel experienced in the collection and analysis of electronic documents. We use the latest analytical tools and technologies in a cost-efficient manner to quickly identify pertinent documents and electronically stored information, which we often obtain under court order, that can help us secure a successful result.
Articles + Publications
03.29.24
Noncompete Covenants in Deferred Compensation Plans: Proceed with Caution
Articles + Publications
01.11.24
Water Cooler Talk: Insights on Noncompetes From ‘The Office'
Articles + Publications
01.03.24
5 Steps for Preventing and Mitigating Corporate Espionage
Hiring to Firing Law Blog
11.06.23
Navigating Noncompetes: A Comprehensive Guide – Part 1
Articles + Publications
03.21.23
FTC Extends Comment Period on Proposed Ban of Noncompete Agreements
Podcasts
01.31.23
Crashing and Burning: What Companies Can Learn From the Apple TV+ Series WeCrashed