The Revolving Door of Autonomous Vehicle Talent: Managing Employee Access to Trade Secrets & Facilitating Robust Investigation of Safety Issues

As autonomous vehicle (“AV”) developers continue their race to automation they must simultaneously be cognizant of protecting their valuable trade secrets. AVs remain an emerging enterprise and safety remains a paramount concern for developers, and open access to trade secrets for employees remains a crucial aspect of AV development as well as in ensuing investigations of safety issues by regulators and in discovery battles among various suppliers to determine root cause of litigation issues. AV developers have been aggressively working to safeguard their vital design documents and data, and have increasingly relied on lawsuits to protect their proprietary information and to prevent such information from reaching their competitors as human talent continues to revolve through the AV industry. Given the increasing popularity of self-driving technology, AV developers should remain vigilant in protecting the trade secrets governing their autonomous vehicle programs and should be sure to implement sound policies for retrieving data upon employee departure.

Join Crowell & Moring attorneys Cheryl Falvey, Rukiya Mohamed, and Paul Mathis on May 12th, 2020 at 02:00 p.m. EDT for a live webinar discussion on trade secret and liability issues unique to AV developers as well as best practices.

This webinar is part of Crowell & Moring’s Trade Secrets Webinar Series, a live webinar on the second Tuesday of each month. These webinars will be dedicated to helping companies create best practices around their trade secrets, identify potential weaknesses, and provide them with practical knowledge on how to secure their most valuable information.