Employee mobility is a boon to employers and employees alike, but it also presents unique challenges for preserving trade secret information. Those challenges include not only preserving one's own trade secrets on the back end, but also defending against accusations that an employee has misappropriated a former employer or third party's IP on the front end.

Rather than waiting for those challenges to ripen into costly litigation, employers should adopt four best practices on the front end—during the onboarding process—to prevent disputes from arising in the first place and – in the event they do arise – being prepared to defend the company. Those four best practices are:

I. BE PARTICULAR ABOUT PROCESSES