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When it comes to making sure your business is unique, there are many elements of the goods and services you offer that you may want to keep under wraps.
Confidential information is an important aspect of your intellectual property protection and one that is often overlooked.
There are a number of ways you can seek to protect your trade secrets but it is important that you put a strategy in place:
Step 1: determining what a trade secret is and what you should be protecting?
In terms of a definition a ‘Trade Secret’ means information which meets all of the following requirements:
(a) is secret in the sense that it is not, as a body or in the precise configuration and assembly of its components, generally known among or readily accessible to persons within the circles that normally deal with the kind of information in question
(b) has commercial value because it is secret; and
(c) has been subject to reasonable steps under the circumstances, by the person lawfully in control of the information, to keep it secret.
Essentially when it comes to determining what you should consider protecting, you need to consider what would be significantly damaging to your business if it was public information. Think Big Mac sauce for McDonalds or KFC’s secret herbs and spices- if this information was in the public domain those products would not be as popular or unique to those businesses.
Step 2: Ring-fence the information within your organisation
While the initial focus is making sure the trade secrets do not escape out to the wider public, you also need to think about keeping things secret closer to home. It is likely that all of your staff do not need to privy to the confidential information and this can also prevent a potential link when there is a turn over of staff.
There is a number of steps you can take to ring-fence the information including:
- Ensuring that access to confidential papers is granted to a select few employees – with such information being kept under lock and key.
- All electronic documents should be password protected with the password distributed to select individuals
- There should be a firewall put in place to ensure those without authorisation cannot access the files relating to confidential information.
Step 3: Utilise a Non-Disclosure Agreement for any third parties
When it comes to product development or expansion of services, this may require the involvement of third parties. Whether these are manufacturers or marketeers, it is likely that they may need certain information to do their job effectively that you don’t want to release to the public.
This is where a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) comes in.
An NDA is an agreement in with the party signing agrees to keep the information disclosed to them secret and not to disclose the information to any other person. This agreement can be as wide or as narrow as you need it to be and is an important tool for a business owner.
The right next steps for you to protect your trade secrets may differ depending on the type of business you operate, but it’s important that don’t dismiss the protection of trade secrets as once these are out in the public domain, they are there forever.
For more information on how to protect your business, get in touch
