An employee or a group suddenly leaves your company and jumps ship to join one of your main competitors. Appropriate company personnel begin checking their offices and their computers to determine if any corporate information is missing or has been taken by the employees, and they discover that your employees have taken your company’s most vital confidential customer list, pricing data, contact information for your main customers and a host of other competitively sensitive information.
What can you do? Well, prior to this year, if the information constituted a trade secret (i.e., information not generally in the public domain that was developed by your company, which gives you an economic advantage over your competitors) you were generally relegated to seeking an injunction and other relief in state court under the Uniform Trade Secrets Act, or UTSA. The problem with state court is that due to the congestion in the state court system, the lack of personnel and staffing, your lawyer may not be able to obtain an emergency hearing for weeks or even months. By that time, the damage could be done and your company could be crippled.
