The DTSA And Inevitable Disclosure

A recent decision in the Northern District of Illinois gave life to the inevitable disclosure doctrine under the Defend Trade Secrets Act. Inevitable disclosure is a common law doctrine by which a court can prevent a former employee from working for a competitor of his or her former employer where doing so would require the employee to depend upon his or her former employer's trade secret information. See, e.g., PepsiCo, Inc. v. Redmond, 54 F.3d 1262 (7th Cir. 1995). To date, some commentators have suggested that the inevitable disclosure doctrine is not available under the DTSA because of language in the statute indicating that any injunction granted under the statute to prevent trade secret misappropriation may not "prevent a person from entering into an employment relationship," and that any conditions placed on employment must be based on "evidence of threatened misappropriation and not merely on the information the person knows." The Northern District of