The Trade Secret Scholars Lifetime Achievement Award recognizes and appreciates Sandeen’s dedication, friendship, and pioneering contributions to the law of trade secrets.
A seemingly regular appearance at the Trade Secret Scholars Workshop would turn out to have more in store for Professor Sharon Sandeen than expected. In addition to connecting with fellow scholars and advancing understanding in the field of trade secret law, Sandeen would leave this year’s workshop as the proud recipient of their first-ever Lifetime Achievement Award.
“I was very surprised and honored by the award because I had no clue from the published agenda that it would be awarded and because of the kind remarks of the other trade secret scholars,” she said.
As an internationally renowned expert on trade secret law, Sandeen has written three books with Professor Elizabeth Rowe—including the first casebook on trade secret law in the United States—and over 30 articles and book chapters on trade secret law and other intellectual property topics. She became a full-time professor at Mitchell Hamline in 2002, a time when the field of trade secret law was ignored by legal scholars, she said. Since then, the field’s scholarship has “exploded,” and today it provides a foundation to address increasingly relevant secrecy issues related to artificial intelligence technologies and government transparency.
“My goals when deciding to focus on trade secret law were two-fold,” said Sandeen. “First, I wanted scholars, attorneys, and policymakers to pay more attention to this important aspect of innovation policy. Second, I wanted to build a trade secret scholars community.”
Professor Sharon Sandeen
Both goals have come to fruition over her 22-plus years in the field, and the expansion of trade secret law scholarship as a whole has strong ties to Mitchell Hamline and Sandeen’s work.
In 2010, Sandeen organized a symposium on trade secret law hosted by the then-Hamline Law Review to mark the 30th anniversary of the Uniform Trade Secrets Act. Only a year and a half later, the Trade Secret Scholars Workshop series began, with the goal of creating a community of scholars. Since then, regular in-person workshops have been held across the country, with at least two virtual workshops following the Covid pandemic. This year’s workshop was hosted at the University of Virginia, home to Sandeen’s longtime co-author Rowe, and Mitchell Hamline hosted the previous in-person meeting in 2023.
“I am very proud to be recognized around the world for my expertise in the field,” said Sandeen. “But what makes me most happy are all the other scholars I met and mentored along the way. They are amazing people and scholars.”
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