Trade Secret Audits

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Trade Secrets

A trade secret audit measures your actual protection against legal standards, exposes the gaps between policy and practice, and hands you a prioritized plan to fix vulnerabilities before they cost you a claim.

Protection erodes quietly. People leave, systems change, vendors come and go, and the measures that looked solid two years ago no longer match how the business runs. A trade secret audit is how you find that drift before an opponent does. We assess where your protection stands, where it leaks, and what to fix first, giving you a clear-eyed read on whether your secrets would survive scrutiny in court.

Measuring Your Protection

We evaluate your existing safeguards against what trade secret law actually requires and what well-run programs do in practice. The most common finding is a gap between written policy and daily behavior: strong documents that nobody follows, or sensible habits that were never recorded. We surface both, because either one can sink a misappropriation claim when a defendant argues your measures were not reasonable.

Finding The Vulnerabilities

We trace how confidential information actually moves through your organization and where it escapes. That means examining access controls, system and physical security, departing-employee procedures, and the third-party relationships, contractors, partners, and integrations, that most often become the weak point. We map each risk to a real exposure scenario so you understand not just that a gap exists but what it could cost you.

Reviewing The Documentation

Your enforcement options depend on the paper trail. We review the agreements, marking practices, training records, and policies meant to support your protection, and flag where the record is thin, stale, or inconsistent. Missing or contradictory documentation is one of the first things opposing counsel exploits, so we identify those weaknesses while you still have time to cure them rather than discovering them mid-litigation.

Your Prioritized Action Plan

An audit is only useful if you can act on it. We rank what we find by risk and effort, separating the urgent fixes from the long-term improvements, and give you concrete steps rather than a vague list of concerns. You leave with a practical roadmap, scoped to your resources, that strengthens both your day-to-day protection and your position if you ever have to enforce.

Frequently asked questions

An audit finds the gaps between what your policies say and what your people actually do, before those gaps cost you a claim. It also confirms your protections still qualify as reasonable as the business changes, and it builds the documentation you'll lean on if you ever have to enforce your rights.

At least annually. Add an audit after any major change, such as an acquisition, a new product line, a reorganization, or a security incident, since each of those can open new exposure that your existing controls weren't built for.

How you identify and classify confidential information, who has access to it, your NDAs and employment agreements, your IT and physical security, your onboarding and offboarding steps, and how you handle third parties. The goal is to map your real-world practices against the legal standard.

Legal, IT security, HR, and the business people who actually know what the sensitive information is and how it gets used. The most useful findings come from talking to the people who handle the information day to day, not just reading the policy binder.

They may be. When the audit is conducted by counsel for the purpose of legal advice, the findings can fall under attorney-client privilege and work-product protection. We structure the engagement to support that protection, though no privilege is guaranteed in every situation.

A clear set of findings and recommendations, ranked so you know what to fix first. From there we help you prioritize the remediation and can assist with putting the changes in place.

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