Employee Departures: Six proactive steps to protect your IP

Employee Departures: Six proactive steps to protect your IP

From the smallest companies to the most-sophisticated operations, many have poor control over their data universe, especially in the wake of employee departures. A proactive approach guided by internal legal, IT, and human resources teams, outside counsel, and data protection and forensics experts like UnitedLex can significantly reduce the risk of compromising losing critical IP.

Our latest article dives into the following tactics:

  1. Make sure device, disclosure, tech fair-use policies are crystal clear.
  2. Monitor your data and network and ensure you are updating as needed.
  3. Remove access to resources and disable accounts upon departure.
  4. Use installed application reports.
  5. Complete thorough exit interviews and conduct them with transparency.
  6. Retain an IP protection team.

At the end of the day, preventive IP protection is the best way to ensure valuable IP remains secure when an employee leaves an organization. Having clear policies and deploying best practices for protecting IP provides a baseline standard. Once an ex-employee exfiltrates IP, the challenge of retrieving it escalates quickly. If an employee leaves with IP on their personal device and there is no policy in place to grant access, there may be little recourse as legal protections related to privacy offer a shield to the individual.

Are you doing everything you can to protect your company's IP when an employee exits the organization? Get the facts and know-how here: Employee Departures: 6 Steps to Protecting your IP Through a Changing Workforce - UnitedLex


Beverly A.

The Best Candidate in Delivering Real Solutions & Results

1y

I feel there needs to be more clarity to help people understand how the employer/employee/technology relationship has evolved. Understanding these steps from an onboarding experience and also from a departing employee viewpoint have been vital to realizing how personal work generated for the org and data can potentially be used in ways which can help or hurt the individual. The biased and somewhat deceptive predatory practices used to circumvent an employees personal rights to their data to become an employee for an organization can’t be realized until they have achieved the awareness of how their data has been taken throughout their lifetime without valuation. The method of companies using the person for their data creates the ambuiguity within the required acceptances when becoming associated with the organization and all external third party affiliations. It does not protect the people the systems may hold the data on. As a result, legal teams, insurance agents, programmers and engineers can consider providing the privacy notices and legal disclaimers to instead protect the individual instead of the company as a whole. As digital transformation continues to shape a global shift, these system migrations will increase.

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