Why this is the #1 threat to today’s successful companies
The headlines just keep coming!
- “Waymo, the self-driving car company that began at Google, is suing Uber in a stunning suit”
- “Oculus lawsuit ends with half billion dollar judgment awarded to ZeniMax”
- “Zillow to pay $130M to settle lawsuit with Move over alleged trade secret theft”
Just about every week there’s breaking news of another high-profile, trade secrets dispute, major cases entangling tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars in legal fees, damages, business disruption, negative PR, employee and management uncertainty, loss of shareholder value, and more.
In some cases, such as with the recent Waymo v. Uber lawsuit, the stakes can even be potentially existential for a company. For if the court ultimately enjoins and restrains Uber and forces them to exit or restart from scratch their autonomous car development, this would be a catastrophic blow to those efforts and perhaps the company at large.
The financial risks and losses keep escalating!
And the FBI estimates that IP theft accounts for $500 billion to $600 billion in lost sales domestically, while companies lose market share, suffer reputational damage and see their unique competitive advantages compromised.
Quite troublingly, there is one common denominator that cuts across virtually all these trade secrets suits and incidents: With proactive management, they would have been preventable.
Lax oversight and a dependency on stale, reactive legal documents over active, engaged, consistent management and modernized, secure information systems created a vacuum for problems like these to spawn.
We are now clearly in a trade secrets-driven economy where the success of your company will be increasingly predicated on how effectively you manage, safeguard, control dissemination, account for, assess value, and successfully leverage your know-how and trade secrets.
As CEO, a fiduciary member of the board, CFO or CIO, protecting and safeguarding these vital assets should be a critical executive priority for your business.
Please take our survey to receive an overall assessment of your current environment and a gauge of how effectively you are managing and stewarding your company’s most valuable assets.
Contact us about our IP Armor solution, our comprehensive solution for protecting your company.
Don’t wait until you’re in court to determine if your information qualifies as an asset. Develop your Trade Secret Asset Management Program today.