Legal advice - confidential info

Pawnless Endgame said:
The topic of this thread is called "garden leave". What the OP's friend has signed is a form where he isn't allowed to work as a competitor or for a competitor for x amount of time, due to trade secrets. An example of this is Formula 1. If you previously worked for Ferarri, you wouldn't be allowed to join Mercedes straight away.
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nah gardening leave involves being paid for a particular period after quitting

if they've been made redundant and are no longer employed then they're not on gardening leave - they might have some clauses in their contract re: competitors and some duration of time - though whether those clauses are considered reasonable and therefore enforceable is another matter entirely

it is quite common for companies to use these clauses to threaten people - problem is if they've been to aggressive with the terms - too wide in scope and/or for too long then they might not be enforcable - especially if they're not paying you for the relevant period
 
the fact they've threatened him with the police is a good incidator that they don't know what they're doing - I wouldn't therefore be surprised if they've done the silly thing and made the non compete clauses too restrictive
 
unless there is more to this - for example has he taken away company property - like confidential material/folders etc... or say copied some database and taken it with him?
 
Having recently been through a "restrictive covenant" period of 6 months, I can assure you the letter saying the police are involved is garbage.

At best it's a civil matter, however as I found out, despite legal letters, solicitors and threats of court action, 6 months later, nothing has happened, I've got plenty of clients from the previous company and all is well.

Ignore it, and move on - that's the best advice I can give you and your colleagues.

The letters I received said "they were watching me and my family closely", "they suspected I had used confidential information" and they "suspected I had poached clients" - again without any proof and nothing to go on, the letters soon stopped coming.
 
booyaka said:
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What industry do you work in?

Depending on what you do and who you worked for, taking clients from a previous company can be terrible. If its something like your a builder and you decide to go independent taking some of your old clients, then that's fair enough. Or if the reason for the clients move is based on reasoning that sets you apart from other people in your role (they find you more skilled or dedicated).

If you poach major clients which make up a significant portion of your companies customers and their decision to go with you is solely due to you undercutting the company to get revenge, then that's poor show and legality aside, you should be ashamed at putting your malicious interests ahead of your ex co-worker's financial well-being... unless they were knobs
 
Avenged7Fold said:
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I'm in an industry that is commonly known to have some of the strictest restrictive covenants around.

I see your reasoning but I would suggest that the clients came/found me, I did not approach them. My relationship/trust that they have in me, is something that individual clients obviously value, and thus despite restrictions, clients were happy to approach me without the need to me to approach them.

Also the lack of service, contact, poor ongoing support, terrible attitude towards clients from the existing firm made my life easy in terms of clients approaching me.:p:p
 
if you're just dealing with retail clients in finance then meh...

if you were taking clients that contributed to a significant % of pnl at your old place then you'd have likely had a legal fight

there are plenty of places that actually do have tough restrictive covenants that they will try and enforce them if you really take the mickey
 
I don't see how it's reasonable to make someone redundant and then attempt to restrict them from working in the industry that they have built a career in because that means they are now the competition. If you didn't want them competing you shouldn't have made them redundant.

Taking a client list and approaching them is a different matter.
 
turns out that the legal issue is they are claiming he accessed the administration side of the company internet after he had left their employment.

So they are claiming he hacked in.
 
AHarvey said:
turns out that the legal issue is they are claiming he accessed the administration side of the company internet after he had left their employment.

So they are claiming he hacked in.
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Yeah right ....

So they've obtained a court order tracing the IP address of the "hack" back to his house then ? I doubt it.

Someone (probably impossible to prove who) used his username/password after he went ? Why were those credentials not revoked the instant he was out the door ? Looks very like they are trying to cover their own incompetence.
 
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peterwalkley said:
Yeah right ....

So they've obtained have a court order tracing the IP address of the "hack" back to his house then ? I doubt it.

Someone (probably impossible to prove who) used his username/password after he went ? Why were those credentials not revoked the instant he was out the door ? Looks very like they are trying to cover their own incompetence.
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plus, surely the police would tell you not to mention it to the person you suspected!

It's really odd and they are extremely incompetent. the website has had injections of keywords before which resulted in the entire site being redone just to start from scratch. They don't keep it up to date either.
 
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