If you are considering using an employment contract to protect your trade secrets, you can consult a lawyer. An intellectual property lawyer can help you design a contract that protects your rights without infringing your employee`s rights. Courts in all states are dissatisfied with non-competition agreements and welcome the possibility of limiting or eliminating them. Their feelings are largely based on the desire to enable individuals to earn a living in the field of their choice. Agreements that are too broad are likely to be attached or, at the very least, rewritten by a judge of the states that authorize such an option. If the employer wishes to include a clause limiting the invitation to its workers by outgoing workers, the clause should be limited to workers who have access to the company`s confidential information while they are employed. It is essential to link this restriction to the protection of the employer`s business secrets. For example, the restrictive agreement may prevent the outgoing employee from using the employer`s client list to request transactions from those customers, provided appropriate steps have been taken to protect the client list as a trade secret. At least the non-invitation association should not be called “non-lease.” An employer should first determine whether the worker is subject to restrictions. An employer should not be content with a vague answer to the question of whether the worker has a restrictive agreement with the former employer.

The employer should have the employee sign a statement that the person is not subject to any competition or other agreement. If an employer hires a competitor`s employee, knowing that the worker is subject to a restrictive contract, the organization could be sued for violating the contractual rights of the previous employer, just as employers could sue an organization that hired one of its employees with such an agreement. Referring to the PepsiCo case, Schlage argued that “if the worker does not have a frightening ability to divide information, he will necessarily, consciously or unconsciously, rely on the knowledge of his former employer`s trade secrets to carry out his new duties. 39 The Tribunal agreed to say that the facts underlying its assertion against Whyte are “remarkably similar” to the facts of PepsiCo, stating that Schlage and Kwikset are powerful competitors; Whytes`s new tasks were almost identical to those he had to beat; Whyte knew Schlage`s business secrets; Whyte had signed a confidentiality agreement; And Whyte was not entirely open at the time of departure.40 Yet, after finding that the majority of the courts dealing with this issue had adopted some form of inevitable investigative doctrine, the Whyte court explicitly rejected this doctrine as a violation of California law.