First enacted in 1979, and the basis of all modern US Trade Secret legal regulations, including the establishment of the DTSA, in August 2026 the Uniform Law Commission’s Drafting Committee’s will meet to discuss potential updates to the Uniform Trade Secrets Act (UTSA). Originally drafted to resolve inconsistencies in the treatment of trade secrets across state lines, there has since been debate as to whether the act still meets its original intentions. Proposed reforms aim to address this through key aspects of the statute, including reasonable measures, extraterritorial reach, damages, and the interaction between the UTSA and DTSA. This session will review recent changes to the UTSA, discuss ensuing strategy, and consider the effect on the DTSA, and how it may be adapted in response.
- How UTSA jurisprudence has evolved since its last amendment in 1985, including divergent state court approaches to reasonable measures, trade secret identification, and the "reasonable under the circumstances" standard.
- Concerns around inconsistencies in state-by-state adoption of the UTSA and whether it still achieves the uniformity it was designed to deliver.
- How courts are addressing the UTSA's limited extraterritorial reach, and the growing trend toward hybrid state-federal (UTSA-DTSA) filings to extend jurisdictional coverage.
- Review the Uniform Law Commission's Drafting Committee's proposed updates to the UTSA and consider how any resulting changes may require corresponding adaptation of the DTSA.
Ken Corsello
Ken Corsello is an IP Law Counsel at IBM. He currently focuses on drafting and negotiating patent licenses and assignment agreements. At IBM, he has worked on patent procurement, litigation, client counseling, product clearance, and IP transactional matters.
Before joining IBM, Ken was a law clerk to Chief Judge Glenn Archer at the Federal Circuit; an Associate Solicitor in the USPTO; and in private practice at law firms in Washington, D.C. He did his undergraduate work in Computer Science at SUNY Stony Brook, received his JD from the Catholic University, and obtained an LL.M. from George Washington University.
Ken has been the chair of IPO’s Trade Secrets Committee since 2016. His recent presentations on trade secret law include participating in a panel at the USPTO’s “Trending Issues in Trade Secrets: 2019” symposium and as a witness on behalf of IPO at the 2018 hearing on “Safeguarding Trade Secrets in the United States” held by the U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet.