Judy Jennison was quoted in "Ex-Pfizer Employee Overseeing Xeljanz Global Marketing Sued For Trade Secret Theft," an article published by The Pink Sheet, regarding the challenges companies face in detecting and preventing trade secret theft by departing employees.

 It is not unusual for companies to file trade secret theft suits against former employees. Judy said her firm tracks state and federal filings and believes plaintiffs filed more than 1,500 trade secret cases last year. She said on average, about 80% of trade secret cases filed involve departing employees.

Jennison noted that companies do a variety of things to prevent trade secret theft, including having non-disclosure agreements, internal company policies, network security, network policing and physical security. She said the best practice is for IT to monitor departing employees for unusual digital behavior. But companies do not always detect theft right away.

"Often companies don't think to look for unusual email behavior or copying to storage devices until the former employee has surfaced working for a competitor. By then the digital evidence might not be available," Jennison said.