Owners of a unique business selling food for rodents discovered that a couple of employees who were previously employed by them established, as soon as their employment ended, a competing business while making use of the customer information that came into their hands as part of their work for the original business.
The Labor Court dismissed the employers' claim of a trade secret theft and held that the customer contact information does not constitute a 'trade secret'. "Trade secret" is business information, of any kind, that is not the publicly available and that cannot be legally and easily disclosed by others, the confidentiality of which gives its owner a business advantage over its competitors, provided that its owner takes reasonable measures to maintain its confidentiality. A customer list may be deemed a trade secret only if it has an "added value" other than the mere compiling of customers names, in circumstances where a special effort was required in its compilation, and there is an advantage in receiving it in it ready state. Here, the employers have not shown that they have a secret customer list or that it has added value or that a special effort was required to compile it. In addition, as the employers shared the customer details with the employees, as part of their duties, without requiring them to sign any obligation to keep this data confidential, the customer details do not constitute a "trade secret" and therefore the former employees using that list will not be deemed as misappropriation of a trade secret and the employers are not entitled to compensation for this.