Trade Secrets

Trade secrets provide a crucial competitive advantage – they protect a wide range of proprietary information where other protection is not yet secured, available, or desired. Trade secrets law provides an alternative avenue of protection to patent law. CPH will work with you to determine if trade secrets will give your intellectual property the strongest protection.

Patents expire, trademarks require renewal, and copyrights have finite life spans. Trade secrets, on the other hand, may never die. Categories of trade secrets include methods of operation, chemical formulas, manufacturing processes, and customer lists. Vigilant maintenance of your trade secrets protection is warranted because of a high-tech corporate culture, increasingly easy access to information, and a mobile work force.

To strengthen your competitive position in the marketplace, CPH will identify information that falls under the trade secrets umbrella of protection. We will also develop a trade secrets protection strategy that can be readily integrated into your intellectual property plan.

Occasionally, disclosure of a trade secret may be necessary to fulfill an agreement. In this case, we draft, negotiate, and counsel regarding licensing and non-disclosure agreements. These agreements must have the strongest possible confidentiality, non-disclosure, and penalty language. Additionally, in the unfortunate circumstance where a trade secret is revealed, compromised, or discovered, we act immediately. We will work with you to minimize the damaging effect on your business while pursuing litigation options in the appropriate judicial venue– local, state, federal, or international.