Employee Turnover-Induced Trade Secret Infringement: Key Difficulties in Identification

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-551-5_126How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Trade secrets; Employee mobility; Particularity; Reasonable measures; Inevitable disclosure

Abstract

The accelerating mobility of technical talent and the rising strategic value of data have placed trade-secret protection at the forefront of corporate legal strategy. Yet, a persistent and growing gap has emerged between the robust substantive legal frameworks enacted globally and the frustrating practical realities of enforcement, particularly when secrets walk out the door with departing employees. This paper argues that the decisive bottleneck in employee-turnover trade-secret disputes is not the absence of substantive law but the evidentiary task of identifying what is secret, why it is valuable, and how it was used. Using a comparative lens, it contrasts U.S. doctrine under the DTSA with China’s AUCL and SPC guidance, showing how each system converges on “particularity” but operationalizes proof through different evidentiary cultures--adversarial digital forensics versus court-appointed econometric appraisal. Two case studies--U.S. v. Linwei Ding and the Wanglong-Zhonghua vanillin litigation--illustrate recurring fault lines: secrecy in hybrid systems mixing open-source and proprietary layers, “reasonable measures” in an era of trivial insider workarounds, and correlation when the primary vector is memory-based know-how. The paper proposes calibrated reforms: a rebuttable burden-shift triggered by intentional cloaking behavior, feature-specific holdbacks instead of broad employment bans, and an enterprise exit-period forensic triage. These measures aim to preserve both innovation incentives and legitimate labor mobility while converting post-resignation proof-risk into a manageable, time-bounded variable.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Ziqin Xu
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/03/26
TI  - Employee Turnover-Induced Trade Secret Infringement: Key Difficulties in Identification
BT  - Proceeding of 2025 8th International Conference on Humanities Education and Social Sciences (ICHESS 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 1161
EP  - 1174
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-551-5_126
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-551-5_126
ID  - Xu2026
ER  -