If you’re an employer, you probably want to make sure that new employees don’t use confidential information from their previous employers. This would be a breach of confidentiality, a breach of your employee contracts and, in the case of Merlin Wright Associates, could expose you to legal action for patent or registered design infringements. In the not-so-distant past, such risk might have been confined to offices, with documents such as formulae, diagrams, customer lists and contracts kept under lock and key. However, today it’s easy for employees to move such confidential information between work computers and personal mobile devices; it’s also easy to upload such information to cloud-based file-sharing services.
The Evolving Landscape of IP Recruitment: Trends and Forecasts
While your induction process might encourage a culture of respect for third-party IP rights, it isn’t always possible to stop new hires from using their previous employer’s intellectual property. It is, therefore, increasingly important to ensure that your new employees are not exposed to this sort of risk, and the induction process needs to include a discussion of what can be done to prevent it.
One such tool that has been developed by a tech company called El Toro is Venue Replay. This technique enables teams to specify the location of an event, such as a nursing conference, and then collect the unique device IDs of those people who were there at that time. This can be done with known lists (for example, a list of nurses) and has been used by firms including Lexus and Papa John’s.
