Business Law & Commercial Litigation
By the Business Attorneys at Garg & Associates, PC, serving The Woodlands, Spring, Houston, Conroe, Humble, Kingwood, Tomball, Cypress, Huntsville, Westchase, Southwest, Sugar Land, West Oaks, Alief, Memorial, River Oaks, Stafford, Katy, and Missouri City.

Protecting Trade Secrets

Many businesses will develop products, services or even ways of running their business that they will consider to be trade secrets.  These trade secrets generally are considered privileged information and the business owner will not want his or her employees to share any of this information with someone that may be a competitor.  Protecting those trade secrets becomes one of the most important aspects of these businesses.  A Woodlands business lawyer can help you to protect your business.

When a business operates using "top secret" information, they will often hire a Woodlands business lawyer to help them draw up a non-disclosure statement or a non-competition agreement.  These two agreements will hold an employee to secrecy and will carry severe consequences if the agreement is broken.  It will help to protect a business from a leak of sensitive information.  Particularly when a company is trying to obtain a patent, this type of secrecy can be very important.  If a competitor discovered the information before a patent was in place, the person who came up with idea will suffer the consequences.

Some may feel that these trade secrets would be pretty much the same thing as a monopoly.  However, the two issues are quite different.  In general, these trade secrets are the brain child of the company's owner or possibly of an employee.  This intellectual property does not follow the same laws as actual products may.  The public knowledge of these trade secrets also keeps it from becoming the same thing as a monopoly as well.  A Woodlands business attorney can help you to make sure that your trade secrets are safe and that they do not fall into the category of a monopoly.

However, there are companies that will try everything they can in order to learn their competitors trade secrets.  Many of them go about this illegally.  This means that they will try to get an insider to reveal the secrets or they will try to become employed by their competitor in order to try to learn the secrets.  These methods are illegal and if caught, will carry severe consequences.  There are legal ways in which to learn a company's trade secrets as well.  This is known as reverse engineering and involves the other company working their way backwards through the formula to try to determine the trade secrets.  This is where a patent is more powerful.  A Woodlands business attorney can help you determine if your methods are legal.

Many companies will go through great lengths to protect their trade secrets.  A Woodlands business attorney can help you develop methods with which to keep your trade secrets within your company and out of your competitor's hands.  Making sure your employees sign their appropriate non-disclosure agreements can help to ensure that your secrets will not leak out.  Trustworthy employees can be hard to come by but they are definitely out there.  A company needs to take steps to make sure that all employees sign the disclosure prior to revealing any trade secrets for additional protection.

A Woodlands business attorney is knowledgeable with the way the law views trade secrets.  Making sure that they look over everything that you expect your employees to sign to make sure that it is all legally binding is important.  It can be fatal to one's business if the trade secrets make their way to their competitors. 

Call Garg and Associates today at 281-210-0010 or (alt.) 281-475-4640 or complete our Contact Form and let us assist you with your business law services and litigation needs.