The 27th Edition of the International Intellectual Property Law Association (IIPLA) 2025 USA Conference was held at El Prado Hotel in Palo Alto, California. As part of this global event, Soody Tronson, Founding Managing Counsel of STLG, participated as a panelist on “Trade Secrets Protection: Corporate Strategies & Legal Safeguards.”
The panel addressed the full lifecycle of trade secret management, including identification and classification of assets, access controls and least-privilege design, NDA and employment covenants, vendor and cloud controls, incident response, and cross-border enforcement under the DTSA and CUTSA.
Soody Tronson highlighted practical strategies for aligning legal protections with corporate operations, including mapping crown-jewel know-how to business value, designing tiered “reasonable measures,” embedding onboarding and offboarding safeguards, creating clean-room and AI-tool protocols to prevent leakage, and requiring audit rights and trade secret clauses in vendor, JV, and M&A agreements. She also stressed the importance of red-team drills, forensic readiness, counsel-directed investigations to preserve privilege, and using KPIs and risk heat maps to brief leadership. These insights underscored how trade secret programs, when integrated into business strategy, can deliver measurable competitive advantage.
