The end of an employment relationship can be fertile ground for litigation, particularly where the treatment of confidential company information or trade secrets is involved. In one common scenario, for example, employees leaving a company voluntarily to work for (or start up) a competitor may attempt to provide their new employer with sensitive information obtained from their old jobs. In another, employees terminated involuntarily may decide to take along information for use in whatever job they findor worse they may simply decide to destroy critical corporate information on the way out. The variations are endless.
Of course, valuable information may be protected by physical and electronic safeguards such as locked cabinets, password-protected computer systems and firewalled networks, but these kinds of protections are most useful against outsiders. Employees will require access to sensitive information to do their jobs, and it is all but impossible (using technology alone) to prevent someone who has authorized access to information from making some unauthorized use of it. The experience of most businesses is that determined employees will find ways to remove documents from even the most secure environments.
