The “Secrets” to Maintaining a Sometimes Unrecognized Business Asset: Trade Secrets

Bloomberg Law Report

Patent litigation attorney, John Halan from the Michigan intellectual property law firm, Brooks Kushman informs businesses about trade secrets and the steps to take in order to protect their trade secrets.

The basic rule for maintaining a trade secret is as follows:  Take all reasonable steps to keep it secret.  If not, the trade secret status of the secret may be lost.  While such steps are relatively inexpensive, businesses commonly fail to take them. However, the same businesses will often expend large amounts of money in seeking patents, even if the resulting patents are less valuable than their trade secrets. This typically occurs because businesses do not understand (1) what a trade secret is, and accordingly are not aware they own valuable trade secrets, (2) the enormous value of their trade secrets, or (3) the appropriate steps which should be taken to protect their trade secrets. While briefly touching on the first two points, the focus of this article is the reasonable steps which should be taken to protect trade secrets.

Read the entire Bloomberg Law Report article written by patent attorney John Halan.