Companies fight court battles about disclosure of trade secret matters as diverse as stealing chemical formulas, computer source code, or customer contact information. Trade secret theft allegations are very old news in the technology market, but somehow the legal claims keep coming up. In part, this could be due to new employees’ bringing former employers’ proprietary information with them.
Sometimes before new employees leave their jobs to join your company, they copy valuable company secret information onto portable thumb drives or they send that information to their personal webmail accounts.
As the new employer, you may be hiring those employees because they have valuable information — yet if you don’t want to be targeted by a lawsuit, along with the employees, you do not want them to provide to you, or use, their former employers’ trade secrets.