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Joint Ventures and Strategic Partnerships After the Defend Trade Secrets Act of 2016

By Christopher Pelham and Frederick D. Friedman

American companies, and foreign companies doing business in the United States, routinely collaborate with outside entities in mutually beneficial joint ventures and strategic partnerships. In that process, however, these companies can risk losing protection for their critical trade secrets to outsiders.

Although misappropriation of a trade secret by a joint venture partner is not the most common form of this kind of theft, misappropriation in its various forms is a significant issue in the American business community. The Congressional Research Service estimated in April 2016 that “U.S. companies annually suffer billions of dollars in losses due to the theft of their trade secrets.” In 2013, then-U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder reportedly stated that “there are only two categories of companies affected by trade secret theft: those that know they've been compromised and those that don't know yet.” In fact, in an editorial in Politico earlier this year, U.S. Senators Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and Chris Coons (D-DE) estimated that “trade secrets are worth $5 trillion to the U.S. economy.”

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