The reasonable measures requirement
The Defend Trade Secrets Act defines a trade secret, at 18 U.S.C. § 1839(3)(A), as information whose owner has taken reasonable measures to keep it secret and which derives independent economic value from not being generally known. State law under the Uniform Trade Secrets Act imposes the equivalent requirement.
This is a threshold question, not an afterthought. A defendant's first move in trade secret litigation is routinely to argue the information was never a trade secret at all because the owner's protective measures were inadequate. Cases are won and lost on the evidentiary record of what the owner actually did.
Courts look at the whole environment
Reasonable measures case law examines NDAs, access restrictions, IT controls, visitor policies, and physical security together. The analysis is contextual: the more valuable the secret and the more sophisticated the plaintiff, the more courts expect. For companies whose most valuable information is discussed aloud — deal terms, formulas, processes, strategy — protective measures that ignore the acoustic and electronic exposure of those rooms leave a visible gap in the record.
The uncomfortable cross-examination question writes itself: you claim this information was the crown jewels, yet you never once checked whether the rooms where you discussed it were free of surveillance devices?
Building the record before you need it
A counter-surveillance program earns its place in the reasonable measures record when it is written down and operated. That means a policy identifying the spaces where trade secrets are discussed, a periodic professional inspection cadence for those spaces, trigger-event sweeps around sensitive negotiations and departures, and retained, dated reports of each inspection.
The same records serve double duty: they strengthen your standing as a plaintiff, and — because sweeps occasionally find something — they shorten the exposure window and support damages analysis when you become one. This is one of the few security controls that is simultaneously a legal asset.