Acceptable non-competition time

[Rob Holmes]

I'm amending a contract and wondered if any of the legal eagles around could advise on an acceptable time limit where the person agrees not to be directly or indirectly involved with a third-party business that competes with my business.

I was thinking a year - could I legitimately have longer?

Rob

 

[Cornish Steve]

In the US, two years is becoming the norm. Having said that, I'm not sure that it's enforceable.

 

[Astaroth]

Not a legal eagle but do have first hand experience of this one... there isnt a fixed limit for these kinds of things but is down to individual circumstances as to what would be considered enforceable.

People/ companies have a right to earn a living and contracts can need to be broken due to reasons out side of their control. From my experience they will look at how transferable the persons/ companies skills are and how sensitive the information they would realistically have had is. A 1 year period is going to be much more enforcable for a project manager working in strategy than a IT tech changing letter heads in an archaic programming language no one else uses.

I dont know if you are talking about an employee's contract but if you are, my employers did enforce a 12 month period on one of our PMs who went to work for the competition and whilst we won our case (the person had worked on my team in strategy so had "top level clearance" for information and had no insurance experience so totally transferable skills) the summation basically said that we had won because for his 6 month notice period we had put him on gardner leave and counted it towards the 12 months.... ie the judge was only really considered it 6 months of not being able to work for the competition whilst being without pay.

The final thing to also consider is that these things are exceptionally difficult to enforce - would you really know if the person who had signed the contract had started working for the competition? The other aspect of cause is that whilst it may not be legally enforcable prehaps the majority of people would still obey it because they are none the wiser.

 

[Antonia @limeone.com]

whether in B2B or employment contracts are difficult to enforce and the law changes on their enforceability quite quickly for the reasons given above.

It is much easier to enforce a period of garden leave or to pay an amount to the employee for their agreement not to compete than to just use a clause.

Additionally is this is a B2B contract there are other mechanisms you can use. By all means PM me or email me at [email protected] for further information.

 

[Rob Holmes]

Thanks everyone

Rob

 

[annethedonn]

6 months Rob.... that's what ours are but people don't always abide by the rules!

 

[VeryMark]

The advice I had was that anything more than six months had to be justified, but it depends on circumstances to some degree.