When a trade secret case reaches a courtroom, the first question is not what the information was worth but what the company did to protect it: Were employees bound by confidentiality agreements? Was access to the information limited to people who needed it? Were departing employees reminded of their obligations and stripped of access on the way out? A business that cannot answer each of those questions with a definitive “yes” may have a harder time proving that it had a trade secret in the first place, however valuable the information actually was. The fix is inexpensive and entirely preventive—agreements, access controls, and onboarding and offboarding protocols put in place before any dispute exists. Bass PLLC helps employers build that record while building it still costs almost nothing.

Sometimes. Agreements that were routine five years ago may be void today, or worse, a source of significant penalties. Colorado, for example, now voids most noncompetes for workers who earn less than a minimum salary threshold and imposes strict advance notice requirements, and businesses that attempt to enforce invalid noncompetes there can face civil penalties and be forced to pay their employee’s attorney’s fees. Wyoming’s 2025 law similarly voids most newly signed noncompetes outside certain, narrow exceptions, such as those for executives, the sale of a business, or trade secret protection. Enforceability now turns on the jurisdiction, the employee’s role, the compensation level, and whether any required notice was actually given—which means a covenant that was valid when signed may not survive the employee’s move to another state. Bass PLLC reviews existing covenants against current law before an employer relies on one, and drafts enforceable agreements from scratch for employers who have never put restrictive covenants in place at all.

It’s tempting, but don’t do it. A one-size-fits-all template pulled from the internet or written by AI is a liability rather than a shortcut. Such templates are often drafted to no particular state’s law, which in this area amounts to the same thing as being drafted to the wrong state’s law. Every covenant should be calibrated to the jurisdiction, the employee’s role, and the specific interest being protected, and in several states a covenant that overreaches is not merely unenforceable—it exposes the employer to penalties and fee-shifting simply for having asked the employee to sign it. Employers with workers in more than one state generally need more than one form, and those forms need revisiting as legislatures keep moving. Bass PLLC drafts covenants calibrated to each jurisdiction where a client’s employees actually work.

Often not, but you should have some contract that governs a departing employee’s obligations. Employers tend to assume a noncompete is the whole game, but well-drafted confidentiality provisions and customer nonsolicitation clauses frequently protect the same interests with far less enforceability risk. Claims under the federal Defend Trade Secrets Act, breach of the duty of loyalty, and tortious interference do not depend on a noncompete at all, and they describe conduct a judge tends to find genuinely objectionable rather than a restraint on someone’s ability to earn a living. That distinction matters, because a case built on what a departing employee took and did is usually stronger than one built on a paragraph they signed on their first day (although those agreements are still important). Bass PLLC helps employers choose the tool that fits the interest—and has the experience to know when the covenant they want is one a court will not uphold.

Move quickly, but find out what actually happened before sending anything. Not every departure is a theft, and an employer that attempts to enforce a restrictive covenant before understanding the facts risks spending not just needless legal fees, but also incurring civil liability. At the same time, the evidence that proves misappropriation—download logs, device activity, forwarded email, and access records—is perishable and routinely overwritten by ordinary IT processes, so preserving the departing employee’s devices and accounts should happen immediately rather than after a decision to act. Courts weighing emergency relief also ask how quickly the employer moved once it knew, which makes delay costly in its own right. Bass PLLC gives employers an honest early read on what was taken, what binds the employee, and which claims will actually hold, so the response is calibrated to be sufficiently forceful while standing up to scrutiny.