Legal Question in Business Law in California

Re: Employment Issue

The first thing you need to keep in mind is that there are three categories of property here, each further divisible into "yours" and "mine:" (1) the hardware; (2) the software; and (3) the "intellectual property," e.g., your business trade secrets, customer files, the co-owner's personal stuff, and so forth.

All three categories need to be sorted and separated or allocated.

You have to decide whether anything on that computer could be used to harm you or your company after the employee departs. You also need to consider whether the loss of or tampering with data would be harmful. I suggest backing up everything that's yours, or the company's, on another computer or on removable media such as CDs.

Avoid copying any files that are personal property of the employee. Hopefully each user has a totally separate, password-protected log-on and separate file structure. Good luck; this was not a good idea in the first place.