Trade Secrets & Espionage
Proving what was taken, and when.
Digital forensic examination of trade-secret theft, intellectual-property exfiltration, departing-employee data takes, and corporate espionage. Endpoint and cloud-account acquisition, exfiltration-path reconstruction, and court-qualified expert testimony.
Overview
Most data takes are provable if you move fast enough.
Trade-secret misappropriation almost always leaves a digital trail: file-access logs, USB connection events, cloud-upload activity, email attachments to personal accounts, and post-departure access patterns against corporate systems. The evidence is usually there. The challenge is preserving it before the suspected employee, departing contractor, or compromised insider gets a chance to cover tracks.
We run this work under Defend Trade Secrets Act, Florida Uniform Trade Secrets Act, and Computer Fraud and Abuse Act matters, both for plaintiffs trying to prove the take and for defense counsel whose client has been accused. Either side of the v., the methodology is the same: acquire, analyze, document, and be prepared to defend every conclusion at deposition and trial.
Typical Engagement
What a matter like this looks like.
Rapid acquisition
Forensic imaging of the departing employee's corporate endpoints (workstation, laptop, mobile device), cloud-account exports for their email and file sync services, and log preservation across the environments the employee touched.
Exfiltration-path analysis
USB device history, cloud-upload events, email-attachment activity (including to personal mail accounts), print jobs, and file-access timestamps cross-referenced against the period of suspected misappropriation.
Recipient-side forensics (when available)
Where discovery produces the new employer's systems or personal devices, we examine them for the specific exfiltrated artifacts. Matching files, modified-by-user traces, and derivative works identified and preserved.
Expert declaration and testimony
The same analyst who ran the acquisition writes the expert declaration, sits for deposition, and testifies at trial or preliminary injunction hearing. Methodology documented in a form opposing experts can replicate and opposing counsel can challenge.
A Note on Corporate Espionage
When the threat is outside the building.
Not every trade-secret matter is a departing employee. We have worked corporate espionage matters involving sophisticated external actors, foreign-state activity, and coordinated supply-chain compromise. The forensic discipline is the same; the tradecraft required to surface the evidence is not. For matters with indicators of state-level or professional adversaries, we scope engagements with the appropriate discretion and coordinate with counsel on sensitive-source handling.
Active trade-secret matter or suspected take?
Tell us the shape of the matter - departing employee, suspected insider, or external threat - and a member of our team will follow up directly.
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