Lawyer Monthly - November 2021 Edition

67 NOV 2021 | WWW.LAWYER-MONTHLY.COM INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY - PROTECTING TRADE SECRETS AMID RAPID RECRUITMENT absence of loyalty between the parties, which may lead to leaks of an employer’s documents, objects, materials, etc. to third parties. Looking in particular at the “gig economy”, what issues could a business encounter when it frequently hires new employees, from a standpoint of both protecting its own trade secrets and avoiding encroaching on others’? According to a report released by cybersecurity company Deep-Secure following a survey in 2019, more than half of respondents (59%) reported that they had taken company information from a corporate network or device. The reasons vary, although personal gain and being paid by a third party seem to occupy a prominent place. Frequent rotation of employees tends to prevent employee loyalty from developing. Employees who are disloyal to their employer are more likely to resort to leaking trade secrets to competitors. Another factor that may be considered is that frequent changes of workplace give employees less time to internalise the company’s trade secret protection policies. Sometimes, a new employee is overloaded with information during the first days of work and then left to navigate the company’s rules and policies by themselves. As an employer, one should avoid employees who are willing to bring the competition’s unlawfully acquired trade secrets. These persons will likely do the same with the new employer’s trade secrets when the next opportunity arises. How can these challenges be foreseen and prevented ahead of time? Employers can take appropriate steps to safeguard their trade secrets. Such steps include, for example: • Defining what constitutes confidential information or trade secret, in the employment agreement or in separate specific documents, and marking the relevant information as confidential; • Having robust on-boarding policies in place to cover training of new employees, including in the area of respecting trade secrets, and taking the time to perform said training; • Separating access to information depending on the seniority or on a need- to-know basis; • Periodically training employees on the importance of observing compliance and trade secret policies; Both at the beginning and at the end of an employment relationship, trust between the employee and the employer is the main issue that puts trade secrets in jeopardy. • Investing in IT infrastructure that can alert the employer of unusual activity from the employee’s terminal; • Limiting or eliminating “bring your own device” policies or similar measures. However, aside from robust protection measures, such as the ones described above, employers should also use soft skills in relation to their employees so that relations do not become strained and employees have no incentives to harm their business. What effect has the pandemic-induced spike in remote working had on the protection of trade secrets? The pandemic has caught many companies off guard with respect to ensuring that the devices that employees work from at home maintain the same or a comparable security level of compared to the ones they use at work. Many employees had the chance to use their own unsecured and/or unmonitored devices. This situation created more opportunities for trade secret leaks. On the one hand, employees have had less supervision and therefore couldmore easilymisappropriate files and documents, and on the other hand, criminals have had a better chance to exploit vulnerabilities in the companies’ IT defences. Do you expect these problems to grow more significant as hiring practices shift? A 2018 study by the European Centre for International Political Economy estimated that currently 55 billion euros are lost annually to cyber espionage. Moreover, 289,000 jobs are at risk because of valuable information leaked to other states in emerging economies. The same report shows that by 2025, the equivalent of one million jobs will be at risk. Remote work connects even more devices to the