Reminder: On February 16, 2023 (from noon to 3:00 PM ET), the FTC will be holding a “public forum” on its proposed noncompete ban. Don’t miss it. And, if you are interested in speaking at it, you will need to reserve a spot.
The day an employee shows up for their first day of work is often the day they learn that a noncompete is a requirement of the job. But, according to a 2015 study by Professors Evan Starr, J.J. Prescott, and Norm Bishara, providing advance notice that a noncompete will be required actually leads to 11% more training and 6.6% more job satisfaction. Eight states plus D.C. now have some requirements. Make sure you are complying.
A decision from last week, juxtaposed against two other recent decisions, highlights that the law of no-recruit agreements is, like the law of noncompetes, “a sea — vast and vacillating, overlapping and bewildering. One can fish out of it any kind of strange support for anything, if he lives so long.”
The thought of trade secrets tends to conjure up images of cloak and dagger operations, secret laboratories, the secret formula to Coca-Cola, Google’s search algorithm, and the like. But trade secre...