Sooooo I am just a wee bit late with this one. Episode 13 of Fairly Competing is out and has been for some time! In this episode, Ben, Russell and I take a look back on some of the more significant developments in trade secret and restrictive covenant law in 2021, and give our
The Biden Executive Order Seeking to Curtail Non-Competes: Why It May Be Bad for Small Companies
As he promised during the 2020 presidential campaign, President Joe Biden issued an Executive Order on Friday that directs the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to curtail the use of unfair non-competes or other agreements that may limit employee mobility. This Executive Order is the culmination of efforts by federal legislators to ban or limit non-competes. A number of bills have been brought to the floor of the U.S. Senate, mostly by Democratic Senators, and none of been able to marshal sufficient bipartisan support to advance. As those legislative efforts fizzled, several of those senators then lobbied the FTC to ban non-competes, which in turn held hearings over whether to take regulatory action early last year.
As explained in greater detail below, the Biden Executive Order is short on detail and simply encourages the FTC to take unspecified action against unfair non-competes and other agreements limiting employee mobility. On its face, the Executive Order focuses on “unfair” agreements which have generally been understood to mean non-competes imposed on lower-wage workers. Should, however, the FTC take a more aggressive approach to ban all non-competes, that could harm one of the key drivers of employment in the U.S. — small and medium-sized businesses that more heavily rely on non-competes to protect their companies.
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Fairly Competing – Episode 2: The Basics of Noncompete Law, and What Lies Ahead
In this episode, Ben Fink, Russell Beck, and I provide some basics on what noncompetes and other restrictive covenants are, how they are enforced, how the law involving these agreements has been changing, and the legislative and regulatory changes companies and employees can expect from state and federal levels in the near future.
Back to the Future: Do Restrictive Covenant Cases from the 2008 Recession Offer Clues to How Courts Will Rule in the Aftermath of COVID 19?
The economic carnage unleashed by the COVID-19 virus has disrupted virtually every industry in the United States. At last count, more than 38 million workers had lost their jobs and made claims for unemployment benefits. And while states have begun easing restrictions on the ability of many businesses to reopen, it is reasonable to expect there will be further turnover, leading to the departure of many employees to competitors. Feeling more vulnerable because of the downturn, employers will inevitably look to enforce restrictive covenants, including non-competes and non-solicitation agreements, against those former employees. How will courts tend to handle requests to enforce restrictive covenants, especially non-competes, in this difficult economy? One guide may be looking at how they handled similar requests during the last economic downturn in 2008 in the state of Ohio.
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Whose Customer Is It Anyway? The Sixth Circuit Further Clouds New York’s Already Murky Law on Non-Solicitation Agreements
Most employee restrictive covenant disputes arise as a result of an employer’s concern about the potential loss of customer relationships and customer goodwill. These disputes generally involve sales representatives or high level business executives that have relationships with key customers; these disputes also frequently involve defenses that the employees had pre-existing business relationships with the customers that should fall outside the non-compete or non-solicitation agreement at issue. These disputes can be very fact-driven and the subject of very different recollections. For these reasons, non-solicitation cases can be especially messy. Unfortunately, a recent case out of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, Hall v. Edgewood Partners Insurance Center, Inc., Case No. 18-3481/3482, highlights a doctrine — that an employee has rights to clients he/she acquired on his/her own time and dime — that may make these cases more complicated, expensive and problematic.
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Monthly Wrap Up (May 8, 2018): Noteworthy Trade Secret and Non-Compete Cases, Developments and Posts
As you will see, I have changed the format of my monthly wrap up post in two ways. First, I am going to start including links to noteworthy decisions that I come across or are forwarded to me. Unfortunately, since neither I nor other bloggers writing in this space can cover everything, this will be a useful feature for those practicing in this area. Second, I am going to provide more commentary on some posts and cases, in the hope of creating further dialogue on many trade secret and non-compete issues. Given the hot button nature of some of these issues, I am going to share my thoughts, for whatever they are worth. Now, on to posts and links from the last month:
Legislative Developments
- Last week, Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren, Chris Murphy and Ron Wyden announced their intention to introduce the Workers Mobility Act (WMA) that would abolish non-competes throughout the United States. As many of you will recall, Senator Murphy previously introduced a similar bill, the Mobility and Opportunity for Vulnerability Employees Act (MOVE) but that bill stalled on the Senate floor. Russell Beck has a post with a link to the House and Senate bills, along with his well-reasoned concerns about the breadth and scope of the bills.
- A blog post about legislation over non-competes wouldn’t be complete if there wasn’t some mention of some activity in Massachusetts. Key features of the latest bill under serious consideration would limit non-competes to 12 months (unless the employee stole trade secrets or breached his fiduciary duty) and finally adopt the UTSA. For more details, see Russell Beck’s post in his Fair Competition Blog.
- Idaho (repealing its recent changes in 2016) and Utah (restricting their use against broadcasters) have recently amended their statutes addressing restrictive covenants. See Russell Beck again.
- Colorado has modified its law affecting physician non-competes, carving out protections for physicians treating patients with rare genetic disorders to eliminate any interruption of care for those patients. Peter Greene summarizes the changes in Epstein Becker’s Trade Secrets & Employee Mobility Blog.
A Well-Drafted Indemnity And Garden Leave Thwart A Non-Compete In New York
Employers who want to hire from a competitor frequently have to contend with the potential fallout from the new employee’s non-compete. Any misstep in that hiring process can easily lead to costly and time-consuming litigation. If an employer wants to go forward with that hire but try to minimize its risk of litigation, one popular approach is to implement affirmative steps safeguarding the prior employer’s trade secrets and avoiding solicitation of the former employer’s customers (see my previous posts on how that strategy has been used successfully by Hewlett Packard and Google in other cases). However, there is another more unconventional approach: paying an employee to sit out the duration of her non-compete (what is known as a “garden leave”) and indemnifying that employee from a future lawsuit so long as she abides by her non-compete. This approach was successfully implemented in a recent dispute in the highly competitive and apparently lucrative e-discovery market. The case, Document Technologies, Inc. v. LDiscovery, LLC, 17-2659-cv (2nd Circuit April 24, 2018), offers a nice case study on the use of indemnity provisions to defuse allegations of breach and provides a roadmap for employers who may have the pocket book to support this approach.
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Monthly Wrap Up (Sept. 8, 2017): Noteworthy Trade Secrets, Non-Compete and Cybersecurity Posts from Around the Web
Here are the noteworthy trade secret, restrictive covenant and cybersecurity posts from the month of August (warning, there are a lot):
Defend Trade Secrets Act
- Munger Tolles’ Miriam Kim, Carolyn Hoecker Luedtke and Laura Smolowe have put together another fine summary of the trends they are tracking under the Defend Trade Secrets Act. There are several interesting findings in the summary. For example, state courts and state law remain the preferred forum and substantive law for trade secrets claimants, at least at this time. According to the summary, while 378 DTSA cases have been filed in federal and state courts, more than 515 complaints with trade secret claims have been filed with no DTSA claims in federal and state courts throughout the U.S. I have to admit that I was surprised by this finding, as I expected that litigants would be eager to secure a federal forum using the DTSA. I suspect that most of those state law cases involve restrictive covenants and that the plaintiffs are more comfortable with a local judge enforcing a non-compete or want to avoid entanglements arising from the DTSA’s limitations on injunctions. Or it might be that they simply want to go with the law they know best, which would be the more developed state trade secret law regime. In any event, a very interesting finding.
- One of the more recent (and unexpected) developments under the DTSA has been the number of motions to dismiss challenging DTSA claims. Olga May has a post for Fish & Richardson’s Litigation Blog detailing those decisions on those motions, which range from challenges to the specificity of the trade secrets pleaded to whether the complaint comports with the standards under Twombly and Iqbal.
- For an update on the modest number of ex parte seizure order filings under the DTSA, see Michael Renuad of Mintz Levn’s article in the National Law Journal.
Can A Website Provider Use A “Clickwrap” Agreement to Enforce A Non-Compete?
A recent decision by U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois addresses a very timely and novel question: can a website provider enforce the equivalent of a covenant not compete through an online clickwrap agreement? In TopstepTrader, LLC v. OneUp Trader, LLC, Case No. 17 C 4412 (N.D. Illinois June 28, 2017), the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois rejected one website provider’s effort to do just that, reasoning that the provider was attempting to use its website’s terms and conditions to improperly restrict competition under Illinois non-compete law. The opinion, which can be found here, may prove to be a significant one as courts wrestle with the enforceability of online terms of condition that may limit competition or the use of information publicly available through those websites. (A shout out to Evan Brown’s Internet Cases for first reporting on this case).
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Monthly Wrap Up (July 31, 2017): Noteworthy Trade Secret and Non-Compete Posts From Around the Web
Here are the noteworthy trade secret, restrictive covenant and cybersecurity posts from the past month or so:
The Defend Trade Secrets Act
- The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas has found that certain deer registry information qualified as a combination trade secret under the DTSA and Oklahoma’s version of the UTSA, as explained by Michael Weil and Tierra Piens for Orrick’s Trade Secrets Watch blog.
- The issue of whether the DTSA applies to misappropriation that may have taken place prior to the DTSA’s enactment has been one of the more frequent areas of litigation under the DTSA. Jonathan Shapiro of Epstein Becker has a summary on these cases for Law360.