Verity Quartermain

This year saw a world in which many employees had forms of Generative AI (GenAI) at their fingertips, either in the workplace or on their personal devices, and a world in which organizations continued to face unprecedented levels of cyber risk as they continued their digital transformation journeys. While data breach litigation is not new and tales of company confidential information being copied and pasted into open GenAI tools have haunted employers for what feels like years, trade secret issues arising from data breaches and GenAI use were not really trending issues in the courts in 2025. Indeed, perhaps surprisingly, equitable and contractual duties of confidence lay at the heart of the few cases involving trade secrets that were considered by the UK courts in 2025, with directors being under the microscope and the courts again grappling with issues around the identification and particularization of the confidential information at issue.