Kolisch Hartwell has counseled clients about trade secrets for more than fifty years. Our services include:
- Advice, negotiation, and licensing. We offer legal advice in every situation that touches on trade secrecy. Examples include reviewing your secrecy safeguards to make sure they are legally sufficient, conducting negotiations to buy or sell a business where the value depends on trade-secret assets, or facilitating licenses or sales agreements for trade secrets.
- Confidentiality agreements.
Your business might need to disclose trade-secret information to
others for some purpose. Kolisch Hartwell can draft confidentiality
agreements to protect your rights. Employment agreements and
non-competition agreements, for example, often obligate employees and
ex-employees to protect secrets they learn or develop on the job.
Non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) similarly obligate non-employees who
receive secret information to keep it secret. License agreements can
similarly control the use and disclosure of secrets by a third party.
Kolisch Hartwell has extensive experience preparing and reviewing these and
other types of documents affecting trade secrets.
We also have a long history of reviewing documents for individuals and businesses who have been asked to sign them. If you are a contractor, consultant, or potential employee, you might encounter a non-disclosure agreement that could jeopardize your future practice. Kolisch Hartwell can read the fine print with an eye for details worth negotiating.
- Trade-secret research. Is a secret really secret? We can search patent and non-patent literature for publications that divulge an alleged trade secret. Our clients rely on us for research in various contexts such as asset valuation prior to the sale of a business and asserting or responding to allegations of trade-secret disclosure.
- Trade secret enforcement and litigation. Trade secrets provide a cause of action against others that obtain the secret information improperly, such as, by fraud, deceit, or theft. If you need to assert your rights—or defend yourself from an allegation—then you can rely on our seasoned intellectual property litigators to represent your interests.