Trade Secrets & Employee Mobility

A New York appellate court recently affirmed a lower court's judgment that the statute of frauds precluded enforcement, by a plaintiff ophthalmology practice against a defendant former employee, of a two-year non-compete clause contained in a 1996 written agreement which was allegedly incorporated into a 1998 oral employment agreement.

In an article published in the December 22, 2010 New York Law Journal (entitled "Nonhire Agreements as Antitrust Violations"), we discuss a complaint and proposed settlement filed in September 2010 by the Department of Justice against several well-known technology companies, which alleges that those companies entered into various bilateral agreements in which they agreed not to actively solicit each other's highly skilled technical employees, and that those agreements violated Section 1 of the Sherman Act, 15 U.S.C. § 1. The DOJ filed a similar suit on December 21, 2010 against another well-known company. Accordingly, companies who have entered or are considering entering into such agreements should review their practices to avoid unwanted attention from governmental authorities.

Please join me and other attorneys from my firm, EpsteinBeckerGreen, as we present a full-day program covering labor and employment law topics that have increasingly impacted employers over the past two years. In addition, we will offer an outlook of what we should expect in the coming two years.

A former Technical Director for a painting and coating company who pled guilty to downloading trade secrets from a secure computer system and transferring them to external thumb drives recently was sentenced to 15 months in federal prison to be followed by three years of supervised release.

The Iowa Court of Appeals recently affirmed a jury's conclusion that detailed information about insurance policy holders was a protected trade secret.

On November 2, 2010, by a margin of more than two-to-one, Georgia voters ratified a Constitutional amendment which effectuated the total restructuring of Georgia's restrictive covenant law. Thus, upon certification of the election results, Georgia will have a new restrictive covenant law, which will apply on a going-forward basis to all contracts entered into on and after such effective date.

A bill pending in the Massachusetts legislature (House No. H4607) which would have amended the state's laws on non-compete agreements, has died in committee and will not go forward. The bill's sponsor, however, intends to introduce another bill on the same subject at a later date.

In October 2010, in Xplore Technologies Corp. v. Killion, CV10-5013459S, a Connecticut state court examined whether a non-competition clause that had no specified geographic requirement was enforceable. The Court enforced the clause and held that the geographic area was defined by the uniqueness of the product at issue and the limited potential customers for it.

In October 2009, in Sunbelt Rentals, Inc. v. Ehlers, 333 Ill.Dec. 791, 915 N.E.2d 862 (Ill. App. Ct. 2009), an Illinois appellate court reexamined and rejected over thirty years of well-established precedent regarding the enforceability of restrictive covenants. Specifically, it rejected the "legitimate business interest" test long applied as a threshold issue by Illinois courts when deciding the enforceability of a restrictive covenant. Last week, in Steam Sales Corporation v. Brian Summers, the first Illinois Appellate District other than the Fourth District re-visited the issue of whether the "legitimate business interest" still applied.

When drafting employee confidentiality agreements, there is a tendency to think that no restriction can be too tight. However, a recent decision by the Illinois Appellate Court, The Town of Cicero v. Wayne A. Johnson, held that a confidentiality provision in a separation agreement was so onerous that the entire provision was unenforceable.