Trade Secrets Litigation: The No-Longer-Forgotten Part of the Tech IP Arsenal

Intellectual property battles in technology are nothing new, but their nature might be shifting . These days, many of the big IP litigation battles involving companies like Facebook (Zenimax Media Inc., et al v. Oculus VR Inc., et al), Uber (Waymo LLC v. Uber Technologies Inc., et al) and Epic (Epic Sys. Corp. v. Tata Consultancy Servs. Ltd., et al) have nothing to do with patents, trademarks or copyrights at all. Instead, it's all about the perhaps forgotten part of IP: trade secrets.

Every company has trade secrets in some form, that “secret sauce” that separates a company's products and internal processes from those of a competitor. In the technology industry, however, the risks of compromising those secrets are higher than ever before, in part because of the nature of computer code, but also the high level of access partners have to one another's systems.

“If I think about a car, as the end user or recipient of the car, you can use it without understanding all of the manufacturing processes that went into producing it,” Monica Greenberg, executive vice president of business affairs and general counsel at LivePerson, told Legaltech News. “I think it's more common in the technology industry, particularly in cloud services, which LivePerson is, that the user—in this case, our customers or other third parties in the ecosystem—gain some level of exposure under a trusted relationship.”