Eliot Wagonheim: If your company is sales oriented, and you have got three stellar sales people that are responsible for 75% of your business, have you locked them down to contracts to what we call restricted covenants meaning covenants not to compete or non-solicitation agreements meaning that if they leave they can't take your customers as their own or bring your customers to another competitor.
Mary Keating: There is a word on the street that this provisions are never enforcible. That's not the case often they are enforcible. If you have the right kind of contract, you can go to court and you can convince a judge to make the employees stop that new job where they are trying to bring customers over to their new employer. You can stop them right in their tracks and that usually is quite effective.
Rochelle Eisenberg: None of us like to think that we are replaceable but most people are. So if you were to have a restrictive covenants, let's say of 10 years, that would be far too long. Typically one to two years is all that you need.
Mary Keating: If you say you cannot do this anywhere else in the country, it's usually legal only if it's something like a high-tech job where indeed there are no geographical borders. So, for example, if you work at home off your internet or that's something that you can do. It might be a reasonable to say you can't do this even if you are working for somebody in Idaho because your web customers can be anywhere but if you are saying that you can't manage a sandwich franchise shop anywhere within the whole state of Idaho that goes to far.
You don't want to find yourself in a lawsuit over this because the lawsuits are expensive. On the other hand if your job is higher level than sandwich making ability and you are making good money, your contacts really are valuable to you, perhaps you have been in the field for 20 years, and worked one year for a company that imposed a covenant to compete on you, it might be worth litigating.
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services