Hi, my name is Alex Granovksy, the Managing Member of Granovsky & Sundaresh. We’re law firm that specializes in employment law. Today, we’re going to talk about a question that we get a lot, which is “what happens if I breach my non-compete agreement?” The short, simple and maybe surprising answer to that question is more often than not, nothing. Nothing happens if you breach your non-compete agreement. The company probably doesn’t care because if you’ve been professional long enough, you know that when you leave “job A” that “job A” doesn’t really care that much about the departing employee. They just don’t want their own business to be messed with. If you want a good measure of whether or notsomething will happen as a result of you go from company A to a competitor, that metric is money. If you move causes the company to lose money, you’re more likely to get sued. By the way, a contract or non-compete in this case might make that lawsuit more or less winnable, as the case may be, but that’s not what drives the lawsuit. What drives the lawsuit is money. That’s why, more often than not, person breaches non-compete and nothing happens. But let’s say something does happen – what’s going to happen? The most common occurrence is the employee will receive what’s called a cease and desist letter. These letters are designed specifically to scare the heck out of whoever receives them. You must immediately stop – that’s what cease and desist means you stop working for company X or else we’re going to sue you, tell everybody and take all the money you’ve ever earned. You know, makes you feel like you’re going to end up in jail if you spend another minute working for the new company. Now, very often these are just puffery.
Let’s look at it from the employer’s perspective. All they have to do is pay somebody like me a few bucks, send a letter and maybe you’ll quit your job. Sometimes the new company is copied on these. Maybe you’ll get fired and to the your former employer, there’s almost no risk in sending it. Just pay some lawyer some money, make it sound real scary. That’s that andmore often than not, these things end there. We get hired by a bunch of people who have received these cease and desist letters to work it out with their company. We haven’t failed yet.
The third and finally, in the most extreme circumstances, some employees do get sued. In my experience this is limited to circumstances where those employees moved money. In other words, their movement from Company A to the new company caused Company A to lose money. Whether or not those lawsuits are won or lost depends on the facts, it depends on the contract and it depends on the law. Those are tough, but those are also the exception to the vast majority of cases where there is no lawsuit or where there is not even a cease and desist letter.
If we can be of service to you in any way with respect to your non-compete or anything else employment law related feel free to reach out. Thanks for watching. Take care.