If you only have six months of experience in an industry, you usually aren't equipped to poach your employer's clients and start a competing business. Of course, you may believe otherwise if you plan to use your employer's proprietary information to train an AI agent to do the heavy lifting for you. That is exactly what the defendant attempted in a recent federal trade secrets case I litigated on behalf of a client in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. In that case, the defendant, a former senior employee at the marketing agency, didn't just copy client lists to solicit accounts. Instead, he used stolen trade secrets as training inputs to build, essentially, an AI version of his old boss, attempting a shortcut to create a competing business without spending years developing the skills and expertise typically needed to provide such services. AI is creating new ways to misappropriate trade secrets, well beyond the classic theft story of an employee...
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