A Trade Secret Wake-Up Call

They are not easy to define, much less protect. Protecting trade secrets is both a technical issue and a managerial issue, and both require ongoing attention. One perennial problem is maintaining a trusting and collegial ambience within the organization while still protecting the technologies, information and other trade secrets that may be the shank of its business. The case of former Google engineer Anthony Levandowski should be a wake-up call. Levandowski was the subject of a lawsuit, then a criminal charge, for allegedly taking trade secrets pertaining to self-driving cars when he left Google’s Waymo project and started his own company, which was later bought by Uber.