Trade Secrets & Employee Mobility

Whenever possible, restrictive covenants should be carefully worded to track the language of applicable law in the jurisdiction where they will be enforced. The South Dakota Supreme Court’s recent decision in Farm Bureau Life Insurance Co. v. Dolly provides a strong reminder of this lesson.  The case concerned an action by Farm Bureau to enforce a restrictive covenant against Ryan Dolly who had worked for Farm Bureau as a captive life insurance agent. Dolly’s contract with Farm Bureau contained a restrictive covenant providing that Dolly would “neither sell nor solicit ...

Following the FBI’s recent raid of the office and home of Michael Cohen the bounds of the attorney-client privilege have become a topic of debate and discussion. During the raid, the FBI seized business records, documents, recordings, and emails. Earlier this week, Judge Kimba Wood for the Southern District of New York ruled that the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York could review the documents seized with a special team in place to review for privilege despite Mr. Cohen’s objections to this process.

Thus, the question has quickly become when is the ...

We non-compete lawyers often rely on an old rule of thumb when analyzing the enforceability of a non-compete: if the restriction is so broad that it would even prohibit an employee from working as a janitor for a competitor, then it is very unlikely to be enforced by a judge. And so when a federal judge expressly endorses such a rule of thumb, the urge to blog about it is simply irresistible.

In Medix Staffing Solutions Inc. v. Daniel Dumrauf, Judge Ellis of the Northern District of Illinois addressed the enforceability of a restrictive covenant which prohibited employment in any capacity

Two western states, Utah and Idaho, have recently passed or amended their statutes dealing with post-employment restrictions on competition.  This continues a national trend in which new state law in this area is increasingly the product of legislative action rather than judicial interpretation.  Thus, even if an employer has no current presence in these states, it is worth one’s time to understand these changes because they could soon be coming your way.

In Utah, the legislature amended the two-year old Post-Employment Restrictions Act (which we had written about before) to ...

On April 3, 2018, the Department of Justice Antitrust Division (“DOJ”) announced that it had entered into a settlement with two of the world’s largest railroad equipment manufacturers resolving a lawsuit alleging the defendant employers had entered into unlawful “no-poach” agreements.  The DOJ’s Complaint, captioned U.S. v. Knorr-Bremse AG and Westinghouse Air Brake Technologies Corp., 18-cv-00747 (D. D.C.) alleges that three employers referred to as Knorr, Wabtec and Faively,[1] unlawfully promised one another “not to solicit, recruit, hire without ...

Earlier this month, Colorado amended its law governing physician non-compete agreements (C.R.S. § 8-2-113(3)).  Since its enactment in 1982, that statute generally has prohibited agreements restricting the rights of physicians to practice medicine, but has allowed contractual provisions requiring a physician to pay damages arising from his or her competition if the damages are reasonably related to the injury suffered by the employer or other contracting party.  Under the amended statute, “a physician may disclose his or her continuing practice of medicine and new ...

A little-noticed decision from earlier this year rendered by the Supreme Court of New York, Westchester County, demonstrates how enforcement of post-employment restrictive covenants will often boil down to a single question: does the restriction protect a legitimate business interest of the employer?

In Cindy Hoffman, D.O., P.C. v. Raftopol, plaintiff applied for a preliminary injunction against its former employee, a physician’s assistant, who began working for a competitor in technical violation of her past employment non-compete restriction which barred her for two ...

The Colorado Court of Appeals, in Crocker v. Greater Colorado Anesthesia, P.C., recently examined several unique enforceability considerations with respect to a physician non-compete agreement.  Of particular interest was the Court’s treatment of a liquidated damages provision in the agreement.  Pursuant to a Colorado statute (8-2-113(3), C.R.S. 2017), the Court held that the provision was unenforceable because the liquidated damages were not reasonably related to the injury actually suffered.

Michael Crocker, a former physician-shareholder at Greater Colorado ...

We just published an article with Thomson Reuters Practical Law discussing non-compete agreements between employers and employees for private employers in Illinois. With Thomson Reuters Practical Law's permission, we have attached it here.

In managing workforces, particularly when addressing employee turnover, employers often find themselves facing issues regarding how best to safeguard their confidential business information and how to protect their relationships with clients and employees. In recent years, the legal landscape underlying these issues has been evolving, as lawmakers and judges grapple with the tension in these matters between protection and free competition.

In this Take 5, we examine recent developments, both in the courts and legislative bodies, concerning trade secrets and employee ...