Hire a key player from your competitor and the inevitable will follow: a lawsuit against your company and the employee, trying to prevent him from working for you and demanding every document on your computer system. If your competitor is being especially nice, you might receive a demand letter just threatening to sue you. Having represented companies on the giving and receiving ends of these lawsuits, I have learned that a company can significantly reduce its liability, and even the likelihood of getting sued, with some planning at the hiring stage.
Here are the top five actions that companies should take before hiring a competitor’s employee:
1. Understand the employee’s contract and position with his current employer
It is critical to understand the scope of the employee’s position with the current employer, as well as the terms of the employee’s contract. Reviewing the employee’s contract will allow you to assess the enforceability of any restrictive covenants, to determine whether you can work around any restrictions, and to decide how aggressive you can be with your competitor, if it comes to that.
But, don’t end the review after you determine that the employee does not have an enforceable noncompetition agreement with his current employer. Nondisclosure and return of property provisions are important, too. Ensure that the employee understands restrictions on retaining his current employer’s information (see step No. 2 below), and take steps to limit opportunities for the employee to use the competitor’s trade secret information at your company.
In some states, a court can prevent an employee from working for a competitor if the employee would likely use the former employer’s trade secrets in the same position at his new employer. This theory—called the doctrine of inevitable disclosure—is illustrated in the Illinois federal court decision PepsiCo v. Redmond (7th Cir. 1995). In PepsiCo, the court barred one of PepsiCo’s employees from working for a competitor for a period of five months even though he did not have a noncompete. The court reasoned that the similarity of the employee’s positions at both companies made it inevitable that he would use the strategic planning information he learned as general manager at PepsiCo in managing the competitor’s beverage distribution strategies for that year.
The inevitable disclosure doctrine has been recognized or applied to varying degrees in nearly 20 states. You can set up a better defense for an inevitable disclosure claim by understanding the employee’s position with the competitor and then placing the employee in a position that will make the former employer’s trade secrets less useful in his work for you.
