A guy who was fired at my job literally bought his company to a standstill once he was fired. Unknown to management he had trademarked several of his techniques and going as far at personally paying for access to some of the cloud services that were widely used in the company so as to make him the sole license holder.
The day after his end of service settlement was paid and cleared he issued a legal cease and desist to them because some of the manufacturing and the quality control systems were of his own design. In addition he removed them from the Adobe Creative Cloud account because he was the one on the account user as well as from the LastPass corporate account because it was his and he owned it.
All that data, all that work they had literally evaporated and they had to pay him an arm and a leg to get back.
It got me thinking; is it illegal or wrong to start trademarking unclaimed work habits and procedures in their own names? Such as specific work procedures, formulas, cheat-sheets; whatever system they would have generated to make their work easier and more efficient.
Even when you cannot trademark, put that stuff in your name for example at my job they are experts on.
I have all my documents and work sheets on GOOGLE DOCS but in my my account with my company as invited participant. Once I leave I am taking all that is mine with me.