Hi, my name is Alex Granovsky and I’m the Managing Member of Granovsky & Sundaresh. We’re a law firm with a specialty in labor and employment law. In this video I’m going to go over a very common section of severance agreements called the non-disparagement clause. We get a lot of questions about these. In this video, I’m going to do three things: one, I’m going to describe what these non-disparagement clauses say, two, I’m going to go through what that means. What are the implications from a legal and a practical standpoint? Third, I’m going to provide advice on what employees can do to avoid having any issues with their non-disparagement clauses. So, first of all, what do these agreements typically can be boiled down to one sentence. Basically, the employee agrees not to defame, disparage or demean the company in any way. That’s pretty broad and what it means from a legal standpoint is that the employer signed the contract not to say anything bad about the company to anyone. Now, that’s broader than defamation. For example – for defamation, there has to be publication, it can’t be an opinion& it has to be true. This is just something bad, so it’s pretty broad. From a technical legal standpoint, just about any negative thing an employee can say can potentially be viewed as disparagement. From a practical standpoint, a non-disparagement clause is rarely a problem and there’s a lot of reasons for that. First of all, the vast majority of things that people say about their former employer never gets anywhere. It’s got to be pretty bad for your employer to (a) hear about it, (b) care and (c) care enough to sue you over it. It’s got to be really bad, inshort, of an employee going out of their way to really spread negativity about their former employer. I can’t see a scenario in the real world where this would be a meaningful problem.
Now, sometimes there’s a gap between when you sign a severance agreement with a non-disparagement agreement and when you are paid. My advice to those clients is as between when you sign and when you are paid, be extremely careful. After you’re paid, you could be a little bit less careful. While it’s exceedingly difficult for your employer to accuse you of breaching your non-disparagement, file a lawsuit for that breach and win.It’s super easy for your employer just say “hey, you’ve disparaged us – now we’re not going to pay you.” Now look, your employer probably isn’t looking to do that. But if you want to have one practical bit of advice out of this agreement between the time when you sign an agreement with a non-disparagement clause and you get paid, shut up. So there you go. Hope this video was helpful. Once again, my name is Alex Granovsky. The firm Granovsky & Sundaresh. Feel free to give us a ring or email us anytime if we can be of service to you. Thanks a lot – take care.