News
David E. Morrison, a principal in the firm's Litigation and Labor & Employment groups, will co-present "Reasonable Measures to Protect Trade Secrets: Lessons for Litigators and In-House Counsel," a live webinar for the Intellectual Property Owners Association.
The CLE presentation will take place on Thursday, May 30, 2019, at 2 p.m. Eastern time. Mr. Morrison's co-presenters will be Ken Costello, IP Counsel for IBM's Watson Customer Engagement business unit, and Shannon Murphy, a partner at Winston & Strawn.
About the Webinar
Courts have dismissed a number of claims in trade secret cases during the last decade because the plaintiff company failed to take "reasonable measures" to protect the stolen information as required to meet the definition of a "trade secret." Because Congress only passed the Defend Trade Secrets Act in 2016, and countries in Europe were only required to implement the EU Trade Secrets Directive by June 2018, the law surrounding the meaning of the "reasonable measures" requirement is still evolving. This webinar will provide useful tips for corporate counsel on how to avoid that frustrating fate, and also for litigators who want to score victories on behalf of either defendants or aggrieved trade secret owners.
The panel includes an in-house counsel at a global technology company, a data protection attorney who conducts trade secret investigations, and a litigator - David Morrison - who recently defeated a motion for a preliminary injunction brought by a plaintiff in a federal trade secret case. They will analyze specific cases where plaintiff companies could not point to specific protective steps they had taken to protect their trade secrets, and in which defendants prevailed via a motion to dismiss, summary judgment or at trial. They will outline the ways a company, in order to overcome threshold challenges to the assertion of trade secret theft claims, can articulate the measures it undertook to protect its trade secrets.