Trade Secrets & Employee Mobility

The fight to resurrect the FTC’s Final Rule (the “Final Rule”) banning noncompetes continues in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. In August 2024, mere days before the Final Rule was to take effect, Judge Ada Brown of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas issued a memorandum opinion and order granting the plaintiffs’ motion for summary judgment which set aside the Final Rule, ruling that the ban exceeded the FTC’s congressional authority by engaging in substantive rulemaking and that, even if permitted, such rulemaking was arbitrary and capricious.

On October 24, 2024, the FTC appealed Judge Brown’s ruling to the Fifth Circuit, Case No. 24-10951, arguing that Judge Brown erred in three regards: (1) she misapplied principles of statutory construction in ruling that the FTC exceeded its statutory authority to issue substantive rulemaking surrounding unfair competition; (2) she erroneously concluded that the Final Rule was arbitrary and capricious; and (3) her order universally vacating the Final Rule was impermissibly overbroad. The FTC describes these “errors” as errors of law which are subject to de novo review by the Fifth Circuit. Neither appellee contested the standard of review. 

We previously reported that the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas in Ryan LLC v. Federal Trade Comm’n, Case No. 3:24-cv-00986-E, granted a preliminary injunction staying the Federal Trade Commission’s (“FTC”) final rule banning almost all post-employment noncompetes (the “Noncompete Rule”), but limited the scope of its ruling to only those parties in that case. Following that ruling, on July 10, 2024, the Plaintiff and Plaintiff-intervenors (“Plaintiffs”) filed an Expedited Motion for Limited Reconsideration of the Scope of Preliminary Relief on the issue of associational standing.

On July 11, the court promptly denied Plaintiffs’ motion. In a one-paragraph order, the court held that Plaintiffs had “not shown themselves entitled to the respective relief requested.” Separately, the court entered an “amended briefing schedule for the merits disposition” (the “Briefing Schedule”) that will likely address many of the issues argued in Plaintiffs’ motion for reconsideration. The Briefing Schedule requires that the matter be fully briefed by August 16, 2024, and the court is scheduled to issue a disposition on the merits by August 30, 2024.     

As we have previously written, on April 23, 2024, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued a sweeping final rule (“the Rule”) that purports to ban virtually all post-employment noncompete agreements in the United States. The Rule was formally published in the Federal Register on May 7, 2024, and will go into effect 120 days later, on September 4, 2024--if it survives the legal challenges that were filed in quick response.

While justice may not always be swift, the news about the Rule and challenges to it have developed at breakneck speed by many litigators’ standards over the ...

We recently reported on the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) 3-2 vote to issue its final noncompete rule that, unless it is enjoined, would ban all new noncompetes and a majority of existing noncompetes (the Noncompete Rule).  As expected, within hours of the FTC’s vote on the final noncompete rule, Ryan, LLC, a leading global tax services and software provider, filed a lawsuit challenging the Noncompete Rule, and shortly thereafter the Chamber of Commerce of the United States of America (the U.S. Chamber) followed suit, filing its own lawsuit seeking to vacate and set aside the ...