Trade Secrets

From my weekly (AM) radio segment titled "Legal Minute".

For those of you who own a business or are thinking of starting a business, you need to know about some trade secret basics. A trade secret is any valuable business information that is not generally known to the public and is subject to reasonable efforts to preserve confidentiality. That means that if you do not take proper steps to protect the secrecy of your valuable business information then the information will forever lose its trade secret protection. One of the most famous trade secrets is the formula for Coca-Cola. They’ve done a very good job of keeping that recipe secret for decades. The best way of protecting your trade secrets is requiring the person to whom you disclose the secret to sign a non-disclosure agreement – or NDA. The NDA contains a promise by the recipient to keep your trade secret confidential. Call your lawyer for a proper form of NDA. Also keeping your trade secrets under lock and key or accessible by only those who have signed an NDA is a wise practice. A trade secret will be protected under law from exploitation by those who steal your trade secrets or those who breach the NDA.