Building an Impenetrable Information Fortress: Trade Secret Protection, Client Data Safeguards, and Competitive Advantage in the Post-Restrictive Covenant Era

Gregory S. Bombard, Shareholder | Greenberg Traurig, LLP

Gregory S. Bombard is a Shareholder in the Boston office of Greenberg Traurig, LLP, where he is a trial lawyer focused on trade secret litigation, business torts, and complex commercial disputes. He represents pharmaceutical, biotechnology, technology, and manufacturing companies in state and federal courts and in arbitration, on both the plaintiff and defense side, with a practice centered on protecting confidential business information, managing the risks of employee departures, and litigating noncompete, nonsolicitation, and trade secret misappropriation claims. He is a co-author of the American Bar Association’s treatise Protecting and Litigating Trade Secrets (2nd Ed.), and his trade secrets practice is recognized by IAM, The Legal 500, and World Intellectual Property Review (WIPR), which describes him as “renowned for his practice in the area.” As employers across the country confront the narrowing of restrictive covenants, his work sits squarely at the center of how companies must now rely on trade secret law, confidentiality protocols, and litigation strategy to safeguard their most valuable information.

• Education & Credentials

Mr. Bombard earned his J.D., cum laude, from Boston College Law School in 2010 and his B.A., summa cum laude, from the University of Connecticut in 2007, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Following law school, he served as a judicial law clerk to the Connecticut Superior Court (2010–2011). He is admitted to practice in Massachusetts, before the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, and before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.

• Recognition & Leadership

Mr. Bombard is consistently ranked among the leading trade secrets practitioners in the United States. He is listed in The Best Lawyers in America for Trade Secrets Law (2023–2027) after earlier recognition as a Best Lawyers “Ones to Watch” honoree (2021); in The Legal 500 United States for Trade Secrets (2023– 2026); in World Intellectual Property Review’s “USA Trade Secrets” ranking (2025); and in IAM Patent 1000 for Litigation and Trade Secret Litigation (2024–2026). He has been named to Boston magazine’s “Top Lawyers – Commercial Litigation” list (2022), to Massachusetts Super Lawyers (2021–2026) following six consecutive years as a Massachusetts Rising Star (2015–2020), and was honored by Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly as an “Excellence in the Law: Up & Coming Lawyer” (2019).

• Professional Involvement

Mr. Bombard has served since 2020 as Co-Chair of the American Bar Association’s Trade Secrets Litigation Subcommittee, placing him at the center of the national dialogue on trade secret doctrine, discovery, and remedies. He is a co-author of the ABA’s Protecting and Litigating Trade Secrets (2nd Ed.), a leading practitioner’s treatise on the subject, and is a frequent writer and speaker on trade secret topics, including litigation finance, damages theories, and protective orders. He has held numerous leadership roles in the Boston Bar Association, including Co-Chair of its Intellectual Property Litigation Committee (2017–2020), Co-Chair of the Senior Associates’ Forum Business Development Committee (2018–2020), and Co-Chair of the IP Basics Committee (2016–2017), and he has been a Junior Fellow of the Boston Bar Foundation since 2018. He also serves on the Board of Design Museum Everywhere (2021–present).

• Experience

Mr. Bombard’s trade secret and restrictive covenant docket spans the life sciences, technology, cybersecurity, packaging, manufacturing, and energy sectors. He defended Revance Therapeutics against a competitor’s trade secret suit in Tennessee; defended a sports-gaming technology company in combined patent and trade secret litigation in Georgia; secured dismissal of a trade secret claim in Delaware on statute-of-limitations grounds; and represented Dicerna Pharmaceuticals in trade secret litigation in which the company’s counterclaims survived three rounds of dispositive motions, prior to Dicerna’s $3.3 billion acquisition by Novo Nordisk. He has handled numerous employee-departure, noncompete, and internal investigation matters, advising clients on how to lock down confidential information when key personnel leave and how to respond when a competitor’s hires raise misappropriation concerns. His broader litigation experience includes defending the LEGO Group and WarnerMedia in a Delaware patent suit, leading a two-week bench trial in the Massachusetts Business Litigation Session in a university licensing dispute, and defending banks, credit card processors, mortgage servicers, and consumer finance companies in Massachusetts Chapter 93A and class action matters — including a jury verdict for a national mortgage lender in the District of Massachusetts. This combination of courtroom experience and deep subject-matter authority makes him uniquely positioned to guide practitioners through building an information-protection strategy that holds up in the post-restrictive covenant era.

SESSION 1 – Building a Trade Secret Program Courts Will Enforce | Gregory S. Bombard | 12:00pm – 1:00pm

Trade secret claims are won or lost long before the complaint is filed. Under the DTSA and every state’s version of the UTSA, protection exists only for information the owner took reasonable measures to keep secret — and courts increasingly scrutinize whether those measures were real or merely recited in a handbook. This session lays out, step by step, how to identify what a company actually owns, how to secure it in a way that satisfies the statutory standard, and how to generate the documentary record that carries a TRO motion. It covers the full employee lifecycle, from onboarding through the exit interview, with attention to the specific mistakes that routinely sink otherwise strong cases.

BREAK | 1:00pm – 1:10pm

SESSION 2 – Protecting Competitive Advantage Without a Non-Compete | Gregory S. Bombard | 1:10pm – 2:10pm

When the non-compete is unavailable or unenforceable, employers still have a substantial toolkit — but each tool carries its own limits, and several states now treat overbroad confidentiality or non-solicitation provisions as de facto non-competes subject to the same bans. This session surveys the alternative contractual, compensation-based, and operational protections, explains where the enforceability lines are being drawn in the most restrictive jurisdictions, and shows how modern information governance and privacy compliance programs double as competitive safeguards. It closes with a practical framework for advising clients on a layered protection strategy that does not depend on any single agreement.