Trade secret law used to be about Coca-Cola’s recipe and proprietary algorithms, the genuinely valuable, genuinely confidential information that justifies legal protection. Increasingly it’s something else, a backstop tool for employers who can’t or won’t enforce noncompete agreements but still want to control where their former employees work next. As courts and legislatures push back on noncompetes, the trade secret claim is filling the gap, and the people getting squeezed are workers who often had no idea their general expertise had been redefined as someone else’s property.
From recipes to résumés
The original logic of trade secret protection was narrow, businesses invest in confidential information that gives them competitive advantage, and the law lets them sue if a competitor steals it. The Defend Trade Secrets Act of 2016 federalized this regime and gave employers a powerful new venue. What’s changed since is the scope. Increasingly, customer relationships, sales strategies, internal pricing approaches, and even the knowledge of who works on which team get framed as trade secrets. The “inevitable disclosure” doctrine, which allows employers to argue that a former employee will inevitably reveal secrets at a new job, lets companies block hires without proving any actual misappropriation occurred. The chilling effect is the point.
The leverage problem
Most trade secret cases never reach trial. They don’t have to. The threat of litigation is enough, because workers face six-figure legal bills they cannot pay while their new employer reconsiders the offer. New employers, understandably, often rescind rather than absorb the legal risk. The pattern is now common enough that some plaintiff firms openly market trade secret strategy as a “noncompete alternative” for employers in jurisdictions that have weakened noncompete enforcement, including California, Minnesota, and now under the FTC’s contested rule. Workers who never signed a noncompete, or whose noncompetes are unenforceable, find themselves blocked anyway. The law is functionally identical, only the doctrine has changed.
What honest reform looks like
Trade secret protection is real and worth preserving when it covers genuinely confidential information. The fix isn’t to abolish it but to tighten what counts. Courts could require specific identification of the alleged secrets rather than vague references to “confidential know-how.” Legislatures could explicitly reject inevitable disclosure, as California has. Fee-shifting against employers who bring weak claims would change the cost-benefit calculation that currently makes intimidation rational. None of these reforms threaten Coca-Cola’s recipe. They threaten only the use of trade secret law as a workaround for restrictions on noncompetes that legislatures and regulators have deliberately tightened. That’s the whole point.
The bottom line
When one tool of worker control is restricted, another tends to expand. Trade secret law has quietly become the noncompete’s understudy, doing the same job under a different name with even less public scrutiny. Workers should know that signing onto an employer’s “confidentiality” definition can outlast any contract clause, and that the legal exposure follows them into their next job. Until the law distinguishes more carefully between real secrets and ordinary career skill, the doctrine will keep doing work it was never designed to do.
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