Employers across a wide variety of industries include non-compete clauses in their employment agreements. This practice has come under increasing fire in recent years. The latest being a petition filed by the AFL-CIO, Service Employees International Union, and a number of other labor and public interest groups with the U.S.…
After signing a non-compete agreement with his employer, president of a consulting firm resigned after less than a year, joined a competitor, and began to solicit his former clients and employees. The consulting firm sued, arguing that the ex-employee was bound by the terms of the non-compete and had breached…
Employers in New Jersey must review their current policies and practices to ensure compliance with a new statutory prohibition on the inclusion of non-disclosure provisions in employment contracts or settlements involving discrimination, harassment, or retaliation claims. The new law, signed by New Jersey governor, Phil Murphy, on March 18, 2019,…
As fewer physicians are forming their own practices, they are finding one potential disadvantage to hospital or physician group employment: non-compete agreements. Physician employment contracts, particularly for specialists, increasingly include non-compete agreements or non-solicitation agreements (sometimes referred to collectively as restrictive covenants). This can lead to expensive, protracted legal disputes…
Where an employee was free to take the knowledge he had accumulated over his nearly 30-year long career into his next job as a consultant, representing buyers of the products of his former employer. Archer Daniels Midland is one of the largest manufacturers of corn-based sweeteners in the United States.…
Massachusetts’ new non-compete agreement statute, The Massachusetts Noncompetition Agreement Act, may provide the blueprint for states like Illinois to follow in codifying the requirements for enforceability of non-competition agreements. Unlike in Massachusetts, much of the current non-compete law in Illinois is not statutory but has been developed at common law…
Where dance academy and employee had an employment contract that specified non-compete provision lasting “not less than five years,” the provision meant five years under Illinois law, and the reasonableness of the restriction was a fact-based question requiring more evidence to determine. In April 2017, Pam’s Academy of Dance/Forte Arts…
When non-compete agreements can and cannot be used? One of outgoing attorney general Lisa Madigan’s final acts was to settle a lawsuit the Attorney General’s office had brought against one of the nation’s largest payday lenders Check Into Cash alleging that the lender’s use of non-compete agreements ran afoul of…
A complaint alleging breach of a non-disclosure agreement and misappropriation of trade secrets was successfully dismissed for lack of jurisdiction where the defendant was not alleged to have sold a competing product within the state in which the action was filed. Brad Diedrich worked from May 2003 through September 2017…