Employee movement is the most common trigger for trade secret disputes. This roundtable explores how companies balance protection, culture, and retention in high-mobility environments.

As manufacturing, R&D, and services become increasingly outsourced, companies face heightened leakage risk outside their four walls. This roundtable examines how in-house teams protect trade secrets across complex vendor networks.

Trade secret cases are often won or lost on contemporaneous evidence. This roundtable focuses on how companies build defensible records before any misappropriation is suspected.

Mergers and acquisition bring about profound risk for the loss or theft of proprietary information, with he added complications of uncatalogued trade secrets and departing employees with deep process knowledge only increasing these risks. This session will discuss practical strategies that in-house teams are implementing to mitigate these risks and allow for smooth M&A proceedings.

• Integration of M&A systems to prevent risk during acquisition, and balance restrictive covenants.
• How to mitigate the risk posed by departing employees with deep process knowledge.
• Balancing enforcement with workforce mobility and ensuring that morale and professionality is maintained.
• Strategies for joint development M&A.

Beyond legal risk, trade secret disputes can result in catastrophic knock-on effects throughout a business: they can disrupt operations, drain technical teams, and affect investor confidence for years. This fireside chat looks at how in-house teams manage trade secret litigation when the stakes extend far beyond the courtroom.

• How litigation strategy changes when trade secret disputes become ‘bet-the-business’ matters.
• Managing discovery scope, technical witness fatigue, and internal disruption over multi-year disputes.
• Navigating investor relations, disclosure obligations, and activist pressure during ongoing litigation.
• Decision-making around settlement, arbitration, or escalation when business survival is at stake.

Strategic collaborations are increasingly central to innovation, particularly in life sciences and technology, where companies rely on partnerships for research, development, and manufacturing. This session explores the trade secret considerations that arise across the full lifecycle of a collaboration, from early discussions and deal negotiation to active partnerships and potential disputes.

• Trade secret strategy during early deal exploration and negotiating terms that protect the ownership of know-how, confidentiality obligations, and information access.
• Offensive and defensive considerations when collaborations lead to litigation or misappropriation claims.
• Managing trade secrets during active collaborations such as joint R&D, licensing, or manufacturing partnerships.
• Trade secret risks when collaborations fail, including “busted deals,” employee mobility, and disputes over the use of shared know-how.

Trade secrets now sit far beyond R&D and the legal team. They run through data systems, manufacturing processes, vendor relationships, AI tools, and everyday employee workflows. As a result, effective trade secret protection increasingly depends on coordination between legal, HR, IT, security, engineering, and operations. This session focuses on how companies are adapting their internal structures to protect trade secrets as they spread across the organisation.

• Why trade secrets are no longer confined to technical teams or formal IP portfolios.
• How data systems, collaboration tools, and AI are expanding where trade secrets live.
• The role of HR, IT, security, and operations in supporting trade secret protection.
• Practical examples of cross-functional models that improve protection without slowing the business.

When trade secrets are misappropriated, companies face an early decision that can define the entire outcome of a dispute: whether to pursue civil litigation, seek arbitration, or involve the Department of Justice. This fireside session is led by a senior DOJ official and focuses on how these decisions are made in practice, including what the DOJ looks for when assessing potential trade secret cases and how those considerations should shape in-house strategy from day one.

• How DOJ evaluates trade secret theft referrals, including evidence quality, victim cooperation, and jurisdictional factors.
• When arbitration or civil litigation may be more effective than criminal referral.
• Cost, disclosure, and control trade-offs across arbitration, court proceedings, and DOJ involvement.
• How early choices affect leverage, timing, and the ability to pursue parallel proceedings.