Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Can social networking affect trade secrets?

Do you want to try to protect your customer list as a trade secret? Then you better think about limiting your employees’ use of social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter for businesses purposes. One of the key elements in any trade secret claim is the efforts taken to maintain the secrecy. It will that much harder to claim that the identity of a customer is a “secret” if your employees are publicly communicating with your customers via social networks for the whole world to see.

For more on social networking and its implications for your workplace, see Drafting a social networking policy: 7 considerations.


Presented by Kohrman Jackson & Krantz, with offices in Cleveland and Columbus. For more information, contact Jon Hyman, a partner in our Labor & Employment group, at (216) 736-7226 or jth@kjk.com.