How can employers stop departing employees taking client information?

The list included a significant amount of information about those clients, including their purchase histories and other commercial data. In the past, employers have used a number of methods to safeguard against departing employees from taking customer lists and other confidential information with them.

What happens when an employee leaves the company?

When someone leaves the company, the HR department is quick to grab the employee’s laptop. But what about the data on other equipment? How can the organization know what’s on her mobile devices?

What happens to confidential information when you leave a company?

The business is no longer viable. Your former trusted colleague feels a level of guilt, as he switches from fifth to sixth gear in his new Aston Martin. The risks posed to businesses by their former employees have never been greater. But what obligations do employees owe to their current and former employers with regard to confidential information?

How to protect data when an employee leaves?

Organizations that are serious about protecting data – and not just when an employees leaves – establish access rights via logons, with a password policy that requires strong passwords that change every N days. All data is encrypted at rest and in motion, and automatically backed up and replicated to central servers (ahem, that’d be us again).

How can an employee take my client list?

Technology has enabled employees to take confidential information on their departure from the business, including client lists. All an employee needs to do is copy information to an external hard-drive or email information to their personal account. Once the information is in their possession, they will be able to distribute or use it with ease.

Can you take client information out of a company?

You simply cannot take client information out of your firm: that’s theft. That includes names, addresses, telephone numbers, email addresses, social security numbers and birth dates. That information is valuable; taking it is like taking computers.

Can You take Your former employer’s customers with you?

If you did take with you a list of your former employer’s customers, your former employer would be correct, because a list of customers is considered a trade secret in the law, and thus valuable property. As I sometimes counsel my clients, “Stealing trade secrets is worse in a legal sense than is stealing computers.”