This presentation examines considerations for an effective trade secret asset management through the prism of trade secret misappropriation, examining how to approach the question of what to protect as a trade secret and how and whether a company would safeguard and enforce its IP if there were a misappropriation. There are six sequential stages of consideration: Recognition, Detectability, Provability, Specificity, Correlation, and Mitigation. (Any similarity to “The Six Stages of Grief is purely coincidental. In fact, following these six stages is designed to avoid grief on the part of the trade secret holder when the time arises to pursue a claim of trade secret misappropriation.)