We spend lots of time on this blog discussing trade secret protection. To give some context, I thought it might be helpful to have a few statistics:
Trade secret and related noncompete cases have more than doubled over the past decade, according to my admittedly-unscientific “back-of-the-envelope” calculation. See here (including imbedded links).
Data theft costs firms (on average) $2,000,000 annually, according to research conducted by Symantec. See here.
In over 85% of trade secret cases, the alleged misappropriator was someone the trade secret owner knew – either an employee or a business partner. See here.
More than half of ex-employees admit to stealing company data, according to a February 2009 study by the Ponemon Institute. See here.
Some good sources of privacy and data breaches are: Privacy Rights Clearinghouse and their Chronology of Data Security Breaches 2005-Present; PC World’s Data Protection
(Note, for future reference, the links to some of these websites in our “Helpful Links” section.)
And, of course, relevance of the picture? (The odds are against you, statistically speaking. Yes, that was a clue.)