Employment Lawyer

Employment law is a complex area and it is important you can choose your Employment Lawyer

TakeLegalAdvice.com has just such an article on Instructing An and what to consider.

Employment Law

Your employer cannot protect against you utilising general knowledge, experience or skill obtained during employment as such knowledge and skills are personal to you and you should be free to make use of it in future employment. Similarly, your employer has no proprietary right in respect of your personality or inter-personal skills and cannot therefore protect itself against losing clients who wish to follow you because their relationship with you is the reason why they have done business with your employer. The courts in recent years have accepted that employers may have a legitimate business interest in maintaining a stable trained workforce and your employer may therefore legitimately rely on a 'non-solicitation of staff' provision, to prevent you from soliciting certain former colleagues and persuading them to leave.

Your employer may also protect itself against you poaching its customers or clients. Such a restriction may be valid even if the clients or customers came with you in the first place. Such a restraint should be limited to the customers or clients with whom you had material contact during you employment, otherwise it could be held to be wider than is reasonably necessary to protect a legitimate business interest. If you had no or no significant contact with the customers/clients or suppliers in question, there will probably be no legitimate interest worthy of protection.

Although a restraint may well be reasonably necessary to protect a legitimate business interest, it may still be unenforceable if it is unreasonably wide. A restrictive covenant must be reasonable in terms of subject-matter, geographical location and time. Employers need to give careful consideration to the geographical extent of the intended restriction because its reasonableness will depend on the nature of the business and competition. The wider the geographical restriction, the less enforceable the clause.

The courts will subject a geographical restraint to close scrutiny because the effect of a wide restraint may be to indirectly prevent competition per se and this would not be in the public interest. The intended duration of the restrictive covenant must also be reasonable. For example, a covenant purporting to restrain an employee from working for two years after employment may well be unreasonable and unenforceable. If you have been wrongfully or constructively dismissed (in breach of your contract) you will not be bound by any post-termination restrictive covenants The reasoning for this is that in wrongfully dismissing an employee the employer commits a breach of contract which should not entitle it to then rely on other parts of the contract. This area of law is very complex and this note is just a basic summary. You should seek specialist advice on any particular case.

To find a suitable employment lawyer, try TakeLegalAdvice.com.