.:RIMproInsider:.

The customer list, once seen as sacred, especially when an employee leaves the company - is no longer…. unless you make it so. In a recent case in Illinois, a couple of salespeaople who left a compnay also accessed an online database where all the old compnay customer lists were held, and made full use of them. The originating company sued on to lose…

‘In the case of Liebert Corp. v. Mazur, the Illinois Court of Appeals has held that customer lists stored online in password protected directories were not entitled to trade secret protection where employer did not adequately make employees aware of the lists’ confidential nature…

The court held that ‘[r]estricting access to sensitive information by assigning employees passwords on a need-to-know basis is a step in the right direction.’ This precaution in and of itself, however was not enough. The court was ‘troubled by the failure to either require employees to sign confidentiality agreements, advise employees that its records were confidential, or label the information as confidential.’

So make sure you sign those agreements, those non-competes with your sales team.

For more details visit Internet Cases.com

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 10th, 2005 at 7:23 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.