Protection – showing the “reasonable steps or measures” which will enable enforcement. We’ll soon see if Rippling (details) and Palantir (details) did enough to have the law behind them.
Response – acting decisively in the first forty-eight hours of a breach, including having a plan ready to go.
TL;DR then take the first step and identify your top 5 trade secrets for free or download our 1pager
Lawyers love the phrase “reasonable steps” or “measures”, but founders and execs need to know what that looks like on a Monday morning. A practical answer sits in the trade secret trinity of People, Process and Policy.
People – building a culture of confidentiality
We wrote about this extensively in Palantir, people and the 72% problem: how trade secrets walk out the door. 72% of employees take material with them when they leave a job. 59% believe it’s theirs. Add competitor espionage à la Deel, and at least 80-90% of trade secret loss is due to people.
Process – controls that leave an audit trail
Good intentions turn into evidence when controls are baked into daily workflows. There are simple things you can do now (some of which you probably are):
Policy – a playbook that stands up in court
A single, plain-English policy explains what your business counts as a trade secret, sets classification levels and spells out handling rules for staff and contractors. It dovetails with your information-security and acceptable-use policies, is refreshed after every incident and is approved by the board. When litigation looms, that policy – backed by audit evidence – shows the court you took protection seriously.
This shows you treated them as valuable trade secret and nobody could later claim they didn’t know.
Why bother with all this? Firstly, it is simply good business to have good governance and protection for your business’s the crown jewels. But also, because once you can demonstrate reasonable steps, legal protection lasts indefinitely and costs nothing in filing fees. Better still, investors treat strong trade-secret hygiene as a signal of operational maturity, not legal paranoia.
No control set is perfect. A rushed deadline, a misplaced data transfer or an overeager sales rep can spill your secrets. What you do next decides whether you lose competitive advantage or reinforce it.
What are the types of incidents needing a response?
Your policy will have an incident response plan, similar to others you’ll have already. The roles, phone numbers and even a PR holding statement must be written before trouble strikes, so that a 2 a.m. alert becomes a drill, not a crisis.
Identification tells you what to protect. Protection and Response prove you deserve the shield the law provides, and ensures you can act before damage compounds.
Intanify’s tech will make step 1 easy, light touch and ongoing. We’ll predict your 5 top secrets for free. From there, there is a lot you can do yourself. And Intanify can connect you to our expert partners if you need more help.