Trade Secret Audits

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Intellectual Property and TechnologyTrade Secrets

Trade secret audits pressure-test your existing protections, surface the gaps a competitor or departing employee could exploit, and give you a prioritized fix list so your confidential information stays legally defensible as your business changes.

Protection that worked two years ago erodes as you hire, grow, adopt new tools, and add partners. A trade secret audit checks whether your safeguards still hold up against current law and your current reality. We assess what you protect, how you protect it, and whether your stated policies match what people actually do, then hand you a ranked plan to close the gaps.

Policies Versus Practice

A binder full of policies means little if nobody follows them. We compare what your documents say against what happens on the ground: how information gets identified and classified, who really has access, which agreements are signed and current, and how protection gets recorded. The gap between policy and practice is where most enforcement cases fall apart, and it is the first thing we measure.

Testing Reasonableness Under Law

Trade secret status depends on whether your measures are reasonable under the law that applies to you. We weigh your existing controls against that legal standard and against what comparable companies do, asking whether your safeguards are strong enough to preserve secrecy without grinding legitimate work to a halt. Where the answer is no, we tell you exactly where you are exposed.

Where You Are Exposed

We hunt for the weak points: loose access permissions, thin physical security, unprotected systems, vendor and contractor relationships without proper terms, and employee onboarding or exit procedures that leak information. We also look the other direction, reviewing how you gather competitive intelligence and recruit, so your own practices do not expose you to a claim that you took someone else's secrets.

A Ranked Fix List

An audit is only useful if it ends in action. We sort every finding by risk so you know what to fix this week versus next quarter, and we give you specific, doable recommendations rather than vague advice. From there we can help you implement the changes and build a roadmap that keeps your program current instead of letting it drift back out of date.

Frequently asked questions

An audit finds the gaps in your protections before they turn into a leak or a lost lawsuit. It also confirms your measures are still reasonable as the business changes, and it builds the documentation you'll want if you ever have to enforce.

Once a year is a solid baseline. Run an extra one whenever something significant shifts, such as an acquisition, a new product line, a reorganization, or a security incident, because those events tend to open new gaps.

It reviews how you identify and classify confidential information, your access controls, your agreements, your physical and technical security, your employee procedures, your third-party relationships, and your documentation. The aim is to see your whole protection picture, not just one piece of it.

Bring in legal, IT security, HR, and the business people who know what's confidential and how it's handled. Executive sponsorship matters too, because it makes sure the findings actually get acted on instead of sitting in a report.

You get findings and concrete recommendations. From there we help you rank what to fix first, build a plan to implement the changes, and improve the program where it's falling short.

They can be. When an audit is run by counsel for the purpose of giving legal advice, the findings may be protected by attorney-client privilege. We structure the engagement to preserve that protection where it makes sense.

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