Thursday, January 12, 2023
3:00 pm to 4:00 pm Eastern
2:00 pm to 3:00 pm Central
1:00 pm to 2:00 pm Mountain
12:00 pm to 1:00 pm Pacific

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In the first installment of the 2023 Trade Secrets & Non-Competes Webinar Series, our team will focus on the new Federal Trade Commission’s (“FTC”) proposed rule banning the use of non-competites with employees and workers. If adopted, the proposed rule will bar both prospective and existing non-compete agreements. The proposed rule comes after allegations that some employers were abusing non-compete agreements by deploying such agreements in ways that go well

The American Intellectual Property Law Association recently completed its Trade Secrets Summit in Miami, Florida. The topics for the conference included:

• A legislative update
• Best practices for identifying trade secrets in litigation
• Developments in trade secret trials and changing trends
• Arbitration of trade secret disputes
• Recent innovations in trade secret protection technologies and forensics (Alex Meier – panelist)
• Damages in trade secret cases (Marcus Mintz – panelist)
• Protecting artificial intelligence generated inventions as trade secrets
• Criminal and government investigations of trade secret theft
• What constitutes a trade secret versus confidential information or general skills and knowledge

We always enjoy learning

• Twitter hired a law firm that CEO Elon Musk publicly criticized last month and said “thrives on corruption.”

• Musk told Reuters on Friday that hiring law firm Perkins Coie was “an error on the part of a member of the Twitter team.”

• He added that the firm “will not be representing Twitter in future cases.”

Twitter recently hired a law firm Elon Musk disliked representing the company in a lawsuit, and Musk has since offered an explanation

Seyfarth attorneys Joshua Salinas and Michael Wexler and digital forensic technologist James Vaughn (iDiscovery Solutions) presented a webinar on December 19, 2022, entitled, “Trade Secret Protection: Through the pandemic and beyond.” The experienced panel discussed the latest developments and trends in trade secret protection as businesses look to reestablish themselves in a post-pandemic world, including:

• Workplace hot topics, such as the Great Resignation, Quiet Quitting, and the new Work From Home and Hybrid-Work world
• Heightened risks and best practices for trade secret protection with a more remote workforce and digital expansion
• Forensic preservation, collection, and presentation considerations
• Predictions about the

In the final 2022 webinar, Seyfarth attorneys Kate Perrelli, Dan Hart, and Dallin Wilson discussed new and pending legislation and enforcement issues for non-competes.

As a conclusion to this webinar, we compiled a summary of takeaways:

• The state law on restrictive covenant agreements continues to evolve, with more states imposing compensation thresholds, notice requirements, penalties, and other obligations on employers that make enforcement of restrictive covenants more difficult. Significant changes went into effect in 2022 in Colorado, the District of Columbia, Illinois, and Oregon, with additional states likely to make significant changes in 2023.
• Increased federal attention to restrictive covenants,

Earlier today, the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) published a proposed rule which would ban all non-compete agreements between employers and “workers” (broadly defined to include employees, independent contractors, interns, and others). If adopted, the proposed rule will bar both prospective and existing non-compete agreements. The FTC included an overview fact sheet describing the proposed rule.

The FTC is seeking public comment on the proposed rule, which is based on a preliminary finding that non-competitives constitute an unfair method of competition and therefore violates Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act. This proposed rule aligns with the FTC’s recent statement