Prosecutions of employees taking proprietary software with them when they leave financial services firms is on an upswing.
Our colleagues Peter Altieri and James Flynn at Epstein Becker Green address this in their post “Leave the Source Code Behind,” on the Trade Secrets & Noncompete Blog.
Following is an excerpt:
U.S. Attorneys in many jurisdictions are more willingly stepping into the fray between financial services firms and their former employees who have misappropriated trade secret information. In a recently reported case out of the Northern District of Illinois, two former employees of Citadel LLC, a Chicago based premier hedge fund in the high frequency trading space, pled guilty and received three-year sentences for their participation in a scheme to steal source code from Citadel and a prior employer in order to create their own trading strategy for their personal future use. This continues a trend begun in earnest in 2013 after the Department of Justice issued the Administration’s Strategy On Mitigating The Theft Of U.S. Trade Secrets. Since that time, federal criminal enforcement efforts in trade secret matters have been on the upswing in the financial services industry as well as other areas.