Troutman Pepper Forms Corporate Espionage Response Team
Oct 12 2023
Task Force to Help Clients Through Time-Sensitive Investigations, Litigation
ATLANTA/BOSTON – Troutman Pepper has formed a Corporate Espionage Response Team to help clients combat the increasing incidence of corporate espionage — when an insider or third party accesses, steals, and/or uses a company’s confidential and proprietary information without authorization to secure a commercial advantage. The team brings together attorneys and technologists across multiple practice areas and disciplines to ensure rapid responses and subject matter expertise for related investigations and litigation.
“Workplace digitization, increased remote-work arrangements, and inexpensive data storage have created unprecedented challenges for companies when it comes to maintaining data security, trade secrets, and proprietary information,” said Evan Gibbs, a partner in the firm’s national Labor + Employment Practice Group who co-leads the response team. “We formed this essential task force of attorneys to help clients with this growing threat.”
“Having an established group at Troutman Pepper with the background and necessary expertise to quickly mobilize is a real comfort to clients,” added Partner Will Taylor, co-leader of the response team. “When a client contacts us with an issue, we can send up the bat-signal to quickly bring together the right resources.”
Given the sophistication of today’s threats, a superhero team in a client’s back-pocket can make all the difference.
“The cost of corporate espionage can be hard to fully quantify but estimates put it in the billions of dollars in economic damages each year,” Gibbs said. “We want our clients to be protected.”
Forming the Team
It was in working with his clients that Gibbs spotted the need for a dedicated corporate espionage team. Such matters often require diverse expertise – labor and employment, intellectual property, business litigation, white-collar criminal, antitrust, cybersecurity, and privacy – and uncommon skillsets like digital forensics.
“I found myself consulting with other practice groups within the firm including our e-discovery group, eMerge, to get substantive input, and when I realized it was happening more often, I started to proactively identify the individuals handling similar cases,” Gibbs said.
One of those partners was Will Taylor, a Boston-based commercial litigator. The pair met during a recording of a podcast co-hosted by Gibbs, Hiring to Firing. The episode focused on trade secrets, some of Taylor’s bread-and-butter. The duo got to work in building the team, which currently has 17 members.
“The response team breaks down the artificial walls between practice groups, so we can quickly deliver for clients,” Taylor said.
“There is a real need for speed with these types of matters – you literally must be in court the next day in many instances, so it’s important to have a national team that can get into the right venues,” Gibbs added.
Learn more about Troutman Pepper’s Corporate Espionage Response Team.
About Troutman Pepper
Troutman Pepper is a national law firm with more than 1,200 attorneys strategically located in 23 U.S. cities. The firm’s litigation, transactional, and regulatory practices advise a diverse client base, from startups to multinational enterprises. The firm provides sophisticated legal solutions to clients’ most pressing business challenges, with depth across industry sectors, including energy, financial services, health sciences, insurance, and private equity, among others. Learn more at troutman.com.