Law Commons^™

Executive Trade Secrets, Tom C.W. Lin

UF Law Faculty Publications

The law discriminates among a corporation’s secrets. In the eyes of the law, commercial secrets of corporations are legitimate secrets that deserve legal protection and nondisclosure, but personal secrets of executives are not as deserving of legal protection and nondisclosure. This divergent treatment of secrets has resulted in a legal landscape of perplexing, paradoxical paths for corporations and executives concerning executive disclosures — a precarious landscape that has left corporations and investors dangerously susceptible to revelations of private facts that shock market valuation and institutional stability.

This Article explores this divergent treatment of secrets in the context of public corporations …