Keeping Business Secrets Safe in a Divorce

When it comes to protecting your business and your business secrets, you may already give thought to the importance of confidentiality agreements between co-workers, employees, contractors or investors. But what about your own spouse? Especially when there is a divorce looming?

 Sharing Information Amongst Spouses

It is a regular practice that husbands and wives will often not only work on a business together but will openly share and discuss business secrets and ideas with each other. Both husband and wife will often know trade secrets, or highly secretive details, about a business that one or the other spouse owns, runs or manages.

How much to share with your spouse during a marriage is up to you. But when separation of divorce is looming, you may have a problem. Because now, that spouse has top secret confidential information about your business, and can legally use that information in any way that he or she wants.

And if the divorce is contentious, and revenge is on his or her mind post-divorce, you can bet that business information is anything but safe.

Protecting Yourself

This is why, if you are negotiating some kind of settlement to the end of your marriage, you don’t want to forget to include a nondisclosure or confidentiality agreement. You can include this, as part of a negotiated marital settlement. However, a family court judge cannot enter an NDA or similar requirement; a family court can only enter orders related to family matters.

This is why, if you do have a business and you are concerned about your soon to be ex disseminating or misusing business information, you may want to ask your family law attorney about getting the case to a mediation, where you can negotiate and include an NDA or similar document, and avoiding a court proceeding.

Using Other Protections

You can include other provisions as well—for example, provisions that prohibit an ex spouse from bad mouthing your business, or provisions that prevent him or her from soliciting your employees or customers. You can require the return of any sensitive data or emails that your spouse may have as well.

The agreement can have penalties as well, the same way that any agreement between any two people that relate to confidentiality, may have.

 During the Actual Divorce case

In fact, you should tell your family law attorney immediately, about any business secrets that you have that you are concerned about being revealed, during the course of the divorce.

Often, in the course of a family law case, the spouses may request business or financial documents from the other side, documents that can be used, published or disseminated in any way once the other spouse has access to them.

To avoid this from happening, your family law attorney can ask the court to issue a protective order avoiding the release of any sensitive documents, or else, ask the court to review the documents in secret. Often a court will allow you to redact or remove any sensitive business information in those documents before producing them.

Protect your business’ secrets. Call our Fort Lauderdale business lawyers at Sweeney Law P.A. at 954-440-3993 for help.

Source:

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