This is an update to reflect the adoption by Massachusetts of its own version of the Uniform Trade Secrets Act.
The background:
Until now, every state but Massachusetts and New York had adopted the Uniform Trade Secrets Act (the UTSA) in one form or another – though some may quibble with whether Alabama or North Carolina actually adopted it. (The Uniform Law Commissioners contend that Alabama has adopted it, while North Carolina has not; I view the results as largely the opposite.)
For several years, I had been planning to run a redline comparison of each state’s trade secrets laws against the Uniform Trade Secrets Act to see the full scope of the variation. The task was quite substantial, however, and I never quite felt that it would be worth the time.
In the past, there had been plenty of articles discussing the variations in UTSA formulations among the state laws purporting to adopt the Act, including Linda B. Samuels and Bryan K. Johnson’s, The Uniform Trade Secrets Act: The States’ Response, 24 Creighton Law Rev. 49 (1990), and Christopher Rebel J. Pace’s, A Case for a Federal Trade Secrets Act, 8 Harvard Journal of Law & Technology 427 (1995), but no one had done an actual side-by-side comparison of how each state’s law compared to the UTSA.
More recently, Sid Leach wrote another terrific article summarizing the significant variations among state “uniform” trade secrets laws. Sid’s article highlighted for me the need to have – and the continuing interest of others in having – a comparison.
It convinced me that it was time for such a chart.
So, I made it.
It took well over a hundred hours of combined effort, starting with the yeoman’s work my firm’s then-summer intern, David Haber, and dozens of hours of my time organizing, revising, and problem-solving with David and with with my paralegal, Erika Hahn, who separately spent many hours working on the chart. The chart could not have been completed without their extraordinary contributions.
It is a state-by-state comparison (as close to a redline comparison as made sense) of every state’s trade secrets laws (and the Economic Espionage Act, as amended by the Defend Trade Secrets Act of 2016) to the 1985 version (i.e., the most recent version) of the Uniform Trade Secrets Act.
The chart is viewable here. (It was originally prepared on August 14, 2016, and has been updated as laws have changed; it is current as of August 5, 2018.)
It is intended both as a stand-alone resource and a companion to our 50 state survey chart of noncompete laws, which I first prepared almost seven years ago (in the summer of 2010), though I regularly update it to reflect the changing noncompete laws around the country. (It is also current as of August 5, 2018.)
In addition, for a comprehensive summary of recent trade secrets and noncompete legislative reforms and efforts at reform around the country, please see the page Changing Trade Secrets | Noncompete Laws. Be sure to check back from time to time, as I regularly update it to reflect new developments.
Please note that the most current version of both the 50 State Noncompete Chart and 50 state and federal survey chart of trade secret laws can always be found on my firm’s resources page.