Blog

Congratulations!  Your business is expanding, work is pouring in and you think it’s time to hire someone to help you handle it all.  When it’s time to hire your first employee, it’s important to do everything “by the book” instead of “under the table.”  Here’s a quick list of some of the important considerations and requirements for hiring employees:

Entrepreneurs opening up a new business will quickly run into the challenges that face small business owners on a daily basis.  The Griswold Law Blog will be posting a series of articles intended to address some of the obstacles that come along with running your own business.

For many businesses, success depends upon keeping certain, key pieces of company information strictly in-house.   This information might be a certain technique or formula used to create a product, a client list, or a business plan- all of these could indeed represent “trade secrets.”  Yet there is no hard-and-fast list of types of information that are uniformly labeled as trade secrets.  Rather, the information must fit into the definition set forth in California Civil Code Section 3426-3426.11, known as the Uniform Trade Secrets Act, or UTSA.

While non-compete agreements are generally unenforceable in California, an employer can restrict an employee from utilizing, stealing, disclosing or compromising the employer’s trade secrets, data, client lists, patents, etc. Such confidential, proprietary information is owned by the employer and cannot be taken by the employee for use outside his or her employment with the employer.