Much has been written in the legal and business press in the last year on the issue of employment agreements and certain types of restrictions that some employees are subject to in those agreements. Generally speaking, these contractual provisions are known as “restrictive covenants.” The restrictive covenant is a broad category that includes several related, but distinct, restrictions which prevent: 1) competition against the employer; 2) the solicitation of the employer’s clients; and 3) the solicitation of the employer’s customers.

You may also wonder how employment agreements can protect trade secrets, but that is a subject unto itself which will be covered separately. In this post, we will focus on non-competition covenants, known informally as “noncompetes”.