
How a Legal Journalist Got Fired for a Non-Compete - weatherlight
https://bol.bna.com/how-a-legal-journalist-got-fired-for-a-non-compete/
======
chrisbennet
Very sad. I recently gave my 3 page (really 2.5 pages) client services
contract to a client and they came back with their own 9 page "standard
contract" for contractors. (I'm a developer.)

I couldn't believe how overreaching their contract was. The most egregious
paragraph stated that if I introduced a bug I would be liable for not just
what they paid me - I would be liable for their _estimated loss of profits_
!!!

I quoted that part of the contract and wrote back:

"Nice try but yeah, no."

I had my lawyer go over it and take out all the stupid stuff and we came to an
agreement.

Lesson: Read the contract. If you find that the contract is unduly unfair, ask
if you can cross out the parts you don't like. If they say yes, turn it over
to your lawyer.

Lesson: There is no "standard contract".

Lesson: If they say "It's a formality that we'll never enforce." Cross it out.
("Then you won't mind if I cross it out.")

Lesson for contracts [my lawyer taught me this]: If you put something
egregiously one sided in your contracts you will break trust with the other
party. In my case it triggered a "Whoa, where else are they trying to screw
me?" response which triggers the "this is job for my lawyer" response.

If the contract is for your enemies, do whatever you want. If it is designed
for parties that you want to work _with_ , it's sending the message that you
can't be trusted is not a good way to start the relationship.

~~~
mmanfrin
Do you (or anyone else) have advice for people who are employees? What do I do
if Large Company X wants to hire me and they hand me their standard contract
-- with me being a mid-level engineer of no note (and thus no real leverage).

~~~
ryandrake
Good luck. I've tried crossing out undesirable terms in the past at several
Large Company Xs. The response is always "WTF is this? Sign the contract
unmodified, or there's the door!" Of course, I was not looking forward to
another 6 month job search, so I signed it.

~~~
timv
You need to view the terms of the contract as part of the _pay / benefits /
conditions_ package that you consider before you take a job.

Very few people would accept a job before they found out what salary was on
offer, and so you shouldn't accept a job before you've read the contract. It's
all part of the same thing: "We will give you _this much money_ , in return
for you doing these things ..."

If you've been looking for work for a while and you've only received 1 offer
then you'll probably accept it even if it pays less than you were hoping for,
or if the contract has clauses you don't like. You take the best that you can
get.

But if you've got a number of offers (or reasonably expect to have a number of
offers) then you are probably willing to turn down a job (or negotiate) over
salary, and you should do the same over contractual clauses.

If someone verbally offers you a job with a salary you're happy to take, it's
perfectly reasonable to say "That all sounds fine, and I'll be happy to
respond formally once I've had a chance to read a copy of the contract", but
don't accept the job until you've received and read the contract, because
_that_ is the thing that you're actually agreeing to.

~~~
chrisbennet
The last paragraph is gold. It's easy to forget to make acceptance conditional
on seeing the contract in the excitement of getting hired.

------
exelius
This is the general problem when you have two parties with an asymmetry of
power enter into an agreement with each other.

The more powerful entity will spend time iterating over the process and
identify every possible way they can be threatened. They will write
contractual language that errs on the side of protecting the company.

The less powerful entity will not argue any of this language for fear of no
longer being allowed to engage the more powerful one. They don't know what to
look out for anyway because they are inexperienced at entering in to these
kinds of contracts.

This is a problem for more than just employment contracts. We expect
individuals to have to negotiate against highly-paid professional negotiators
for even the most essential activities in our lives.

~~~
crispyambulance
The good news is that most employers don't actually try to enforce non-
competes unless the violation is egregious (like poaching clients).

This particular case might be a cynical and calculated action to, as the
article says, "send a message" to other young employees looking to move on. It
could be the aggressor here has been suffering from a brain drain and this is
how they've decided to deal with it.

~~~
exelius
Yeah, I realize that many non-competes don't get enforced, but the fact is
that those companies will continue to demand them because the non-compete
protects them in a small percentage of cases (regardless of its impact on
their employees). The companies have zero downside from the NC but it can
significantly affect workers who may feel they have no choice but to sign it
if they want a job. Hell, many of the non-competes are likely unenforceable,
but so few people ever push back on them their legality is never tested.

~~~
srussellkraft
Exactly, and most employees are never going to be in a position to push back,
especially in a field like journalism, where people are happy just to have a
job

------
jimbokun
“We are confident that our employment practices comply with all applicable
laws, and we remain committed to maintaining the highest standards in our
ethical, journalistic and employment practices.”

Oh, please. The overly broad non-compete demonstrates a complete lack of
ethical standards in your employment process. You're really just trying to say
you are just as scummy, but no more scummy, than the prevailing standard for
employment practices in the U.S. Which is a standard largely devoid of any
ethical considerations whatsoever.

~~~
bigtones
"We are dedicated to conducting business according to all applicable local and
international laws and regulations, including, but not limited to, the US
Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and with the highest professional and ethical
standards." \- Enron Code of Ethics

[http://www.agsm.edu.au/bobm/teaching/BE/Cases_pdf/enron-
code...](http://www.agsm.edu.au/bobm/teaching/BE/Cases_pdf/enron-code.pdf)

~~~
mikeash
When somebody states so strongly that they are following the law, you should
be really suspicious that something is up. Like how if a hotel strongly
advertises "our rooms are really, really clean," run away.

~~~
stygiansonic
" _The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws._ "

\- (Extremely liberal paraphrase of) Tacitus

------
leroy_masochist
One important thing to note is that often, when you leave a company, they will
offer you a severance package in return for signing an agreement. This may
happen if you are fired, or also if you leave on your own accord.

IANAL, but I've dealt with this situation and my key takeaways are as follows:

1\. Pay a lawyer to read the document for you and provide advice.

2\. There are major differences in state law, and jurisdiction is important.
For example, if you worked for Google in NY[0], and your contract was a NY-
based contract, and there was a harsh noncompete in it[1], and you
subsequently took a job in California that violated the terms of the non-
compete, it doesn't matter that your new job is in California and Google's HQ
is in California and Alphabet is domiciled in Delaware. You signed, and are
potentially in violation of, a contract whose potential violation would be
adjudicated in New York.

3\. Upon receiving advice from your lawyer, and bearing in mind the importance
of state jurisdiction, ask your former employer to make changes to the
agreement as you see fit, especially if there is an aggressively worded non-
compete.

4\. Don't believe them when they say "this is just a formality". Read the fine
print and understand what it means.

[0]: Has already been mentioned a couple times in this thread, but California
is a much more employee-friendly state than NY. Non-competes are essentially
unenforceable, as are non-poach agreements. It's my understanding that
disparagement clauses are also a lot harder to enforce in CA, but IANAL.

[1]: To be clear, I am not sure whether this would be the case at Google
specifically, just using a well-known California-based company as an example.

~~~
arethuza
Worth noting that in the UK it is pretty standard for your _employer_ to pay
for your lawyer ( _not_ their lawyer) to review your "compromise agreement" \-
there is a standard fee of £500 or so for this which a decent employment
lawyer will be able to get a decent amount of work done even if their hourly
rate is much higher.

I left my previous employer a couple of years ago and it ended up with a fair
bit of negotiation and it was all covered under the standard fee. The
particularly nice thing is that they bill your employer, not you!

~~~
arrosenberg
Interesting. In the US, I would almost never use a lawyer paid for by someone
else. I'd always assume the lawyer's client is whoever is paying them.

~~~
gaius
You pick the lawyer yourself - they just send their invoice to your ex-
employer, after they've advised you.

------
mbrundle
I've worked for several startups (US and UK) where the contracts contained
very broad restrictions like this non-compete. Fortunately my wife is a lawyer
and has helped me to read and red-line them, and then push back and get these
sections rewritten. This is something I would NEVER have thought to do by
myself, and I don't know many other tech people who do this either. I don't
know the legality of these clauses, but my impression is that the companies
don't really care - it's easy to put overly restrictive language into their
contracts because they have little to lose out of it, as an employee is
unlikely to undergo expensive future litigation to sue over it.

Bottom line - there needs to be (a) some low cost support mechanism for people
to be able to check whether their contracts contain anything overly broad that
could hurt them later, and (b) some way of educating potential employees that
they should read contracts in detail, and that they can challenge contracts
and push for changes before signing them, and not to treat them as a binary
sign as-is/no-sign decision.

~~~
pc86
> _some way of educating potential employees that they should read contracts
> in detail_

I don't mean to sound overly dismissive, but isn't this just part of being an
adult? Meaning, don't sign legally binding contracts that you haven't read.
Don't lock yourself into a potential course of action, or waive rights to
certain things (e.g. arbitration agreements), without understanding the
ramifications should something go pear-shaped in the future.

Some of these are sign as is or don't sign, unfortunately. My wife and I were
about to buy a car maybe three months ago, and throughout the process we're
signing paper documents for everything. Most of it printed off a dot matrix
printer, if you can believe that.

Then we get to the arbitration agreement. Handed an iPad with the agreement on
it, no ability to change anything, and a signature pad to sign. I put up a
fuss and said that we weren't going to sign the agreement, but eventually we
had to walk away from the deal because they would not proceed without it and
would not provide a paper copy we could red line at the desk.

~~~
Lawtonfogle
>Meaning, don't sign legally binding contracts that you haven't read.

If we required this to be an adult that the world would be full of children.
Granted, I personally want this. I would like to make 'I didn't
read/understand the contract' valid reason to break a contract unless the
other party could prove with clear and convincing evidence you read and
understood the contract... but I realize this would bring our society to a
halt and would require a significant rework to fix. We live in a society that
abuses consent and to swap to one that doesn't will not be an easy task.

~~~
jdmichal
... Your signature is _exactly_ supposed to be the "clear and convincing
evidence" that you read and agreed to the contract. Now understood it, that's
a different matter entirely and is generally governed by contractual capacity,
which adults by default have. I'm not even sure how you would prove
contractual capacity, short of proving that they can read and understand the
words on the page... Which is basically just the opposite of proving that
someone is _not_ capable due to mental illness or impairment. Considering that
it's much more likely that someone is capable than not, it seems like assuming
capability and proving the lack thereof is a reasonable stance.

~~~
abraae
If "contractual capacity" means that you have a legally robust understanding
of the meaning of all of the clauses in a contract, then I'd posit that maybe
1% of the population have that, even for common consumer contracts such as
with Telcos.

I'd guess that only a small minority of the population have a sound idea of
what arbitration or indemnification are for example.

~~~
jdmichal
"Contractual capacity" means you have the capacity to enter legally-binding
contracts. It is generally understood that if you willingly enter into a
contract that you agreed to the terms. Not willingly entering the contract is
signing under duress and would result in a voided contract. Not understanding
the terms is not a valid defense, unless you were not capable of understanding
them, in which case you would be ruled contractually incapable and any
contracts voided. If you were capable of understanding the terms and simply
chose not to before signing, that is on you.

------
idsout
Where I worked years ago, I told my employer flat out that I wouldn't sign the
non-compete that he handed me. He asked me again two weeks later to sign it. I
refused, explaining how it would essentially give me no bargaining power and
could keep me from getting future work. That was the last I heard about it.

I continued working with some awesome people (my employer included) for
another two years.

------
at-fates-hands
As someone who worked at West Publishing and then Thompson West and its
current iteration Thompson Reuters, I have some insight into why this
happened.

Many of Reuters businesses are starting to face more serious competition.
There was a time when Reuters owned the media business. Now smaller, more
nimble companies are coming in and giving them a LOT of competition.

Legal reporting is one of these areas, and Law360 has been eating into their
market share in several regions. As such, Thompson goes out of its way to try
and hire their help. It gives them more of an insight into what the company is
doing. For years, Thompson West used to hire Lexis sales people just to find
out what they were doing. Reuters still does the same thing. None of the
information is confidential, but it gives Reuters a lot of information into
how they train their people, the areas of law they focus on, how many
reporters are on a certain beat, etc. Any kind of information they can get,
they do. Of course this isn't done in a formal way, it's more off the cuff
stuff you hear around the lunch table, or during an training session.

Law360 probably realized this and called in their ace card - the NDA. Tie it
up in court, or just hamper the reporter in trying to get a new gig and their
problem is solved. This is why Law360 sent out the letter about having
"critical and sensitive confidential and proprietary information".

Simply out, this is a resource war, Reuters is getting beat and uses employees
from other companies to gain a competitive advantage. She just got caught in
the middle is all.

------
derekp7
Something I don't understand -- a non compete is between an individual and
their (previous) employer. The new company hiring the employee has NO
contractual or legal obligations to the former employer -- so why the tendency
towards firing? And if the former employer contacted the new one, making legal
threats in order to get a person fired, isn't that itself illegal? (Wrongful
interference with Employment Relationship).

~~~
bravo22
I am not a lawyer but I believe this is because there is a tort for inducing
someone to break their contract with a third party. Therefore as the new
employer they'd be on the hook.

~~~
stygiansonic
Even when the new employer has not been sued, there are cases where they have
paid the previous employer to settle the non-compete, as was the case with a
CEO Nortel hired from Motorola:

" _The two companies were involved in a brief legal dispute last year after
Nortel announced it had chosen Motorola 's former chief operating officer,
Mike Zafirovski, as its next CEO. Citing non-compete agreements, Motorola sued
Zafirovski in October. The dispute was settled a few days later when Nortel
agreed to pay $11.5 million to end the matter.

Under the terms of that October settlement, Zafirovski and Nortel agreed not
to recruit Motorola employees._"

(Not trying to say this case is anything like that of a much lower-level
journalist as described in the article. That seems unfair and harsh)

[http://www.infoworld.com/article/2674269/networking/nortel-a...](http://www.infoworld.com/article/2674269/networking/nortel-
appoints-ex-motorola-exec-as-operations-chief.html)

------
bluejekyll
I can see non-competes as valuable for people who know business details that
would be considered trade secrets (and only for a limited period of time). But
for people further down the ladder, this seems like an extremely high burden.

~~~
golergka
That conversation should take place before you sign something.

After you sign something, it's not important if it's reasonable or not: you
have to uphold it.

~~~
dragonwriter
> After you sign something, it's not important if it's reasonable or not: you
> have to uphold it.

This may be your personal moral preference, but it very much is not an
accurate reflection of contract law (at least, not in any US jurisdiction.)

~~~
spacecowboy_lon
No it has to be "justicabale" even if you sign a contract that signs away for
statutory rights that clause would be void.

You cant sell yourself into slavery for example.

------
djrogers
I see a lot of advice here to never sign a non-compete form. Sounds
reasonable, but I have another possibly simpler suggestion.

I've been asked to sign 3 non-compete agreements in the course of my career,
in spite of working the entirety of it in California, where they're useless.
When I got the first one, I consulted a lawyer who told me as much and
suggested I sign it with all of the non-compete language redlined out.

I've done that with all 3 of them, and have never once gotten so much as a
comment about it from my employers. The hiring manager is happy to get al his
paperwork, HR is apparently happy to have a bunch of stuff to file away, and
I'm pretty sure legal either knew I was in the right or they never even looked
at it.

~~~
ryandrake
You got lucky. Lots of places will insist that you either sign their documents
unmodified or GTFO.

------
chippy
When I was a freelancer working on my own, a few companies would include a non
compete clause. I challenged them on this always and they were all very happy
to alter the wording. It's about the wording mostly, and about definition of
competition. For example if I am working for a web agency shop that does
e-commerce websites for sports and I am just working on a site for a surf
shop, I would alter the clause to read "in the realm of surf shops" rather
than competition in general. They were happy to change it because it kept the
spirit of the agreement, what they actually meant there. Yeah, I was fine not
making directly competing in a specific domain, but I wasn't going to be
limited by contract in competing in a general sense. It was also clear that
reducing from 12 months to 6 months is usually acceptable also.

Now. The worst clause in a permanent contract is the other works / open source
projects etc. They sometimes want to own all your code even the things you do
in your spare time. They will ask for a list of all projects you contribute to
before working, and if you want to contribute to something new in your spare
time you will need approval from management. Now, I think this is very
unreasonable, and I've pushed back on this so much that I've rejected job
offers because of it. What I do in my own time is my business.

------
hodgesrm
Blanket non-competes undermine the creative destruction process in modern
economies. They will end up hurting the companies using them by making it
harder for successful firms to expand quickly and keeping less successful
firms afloat longer. The problem is individual companies lose little in the
short run by putting them on their own employees.

The answer is to make non-competes unenforceable across the US in the way they
are in California, which makes them generally unforceable but adds reasonable
exceptions for situations like selling a company to an acquirer.

~~~
LordKano
I have been asked to sign non-compete agreements by a couple of employers.

One of them was just a legally worded agreement to not poach customers or go
to work for a customer within 18 months of ending employment. That made sense
to me and I agreed to it.

I wouldn't sign a non-compete that forbade me from going to work for a
competitor.

~~~
hodgesrm
Same here. Unfortunately most people either don't take the time to think
through the consequences or do not have a choice about work that allows them
to push back.

I have similar feelings about binding arbitration, another area where
corporate lawyers have gone crazy in recent years.

~~~
LordKano
In one case, I needed the job and a non compete was a condition of employment.

Instead of signing, I wrote in cursive "Won't Agree" on the signature line.

It may not hold up in court but it was enough to satisfy my personal ethics.
If I decided to do something that was contrary to the agreement, I wouldn't be
violating my own code of honor.

~~~
dalke
[http://www.rudyrucker.com/blog/2010/09/10/what-was-alan-
turi...](http://www.rudyrucker.com/blog/2010/09/10/what-was-alan-turing-like/)

> 1942, age 30. [Alan] Turing joined the Home Guard so he could learn to
> shoot. “[Turing] had to complete a form, and one of the questions on this
> form was: ‘Do you understand that by enrolling in the Home Guard you place
> yourself liable to military law?’ Well, Turing, absolutely
> characteristically, said: There can be no conceivable advantage in answering
> this question ‘Yes’ and therefore he answered it ‘No.’ … And … he was duly
> enrolled, because people only look to see that these things are signed at
> the bottom.” He learned to shoot, but he refused to attend parades, and the
> apoplectic chief officer confronted him, and Turing said, “You know, I
> rather thought this sort of situation could arise…If you look at my form you
> will see that I protected myself against this situation.” He’d decided on
> the “optimal strategy if you had to complete a form of this kind. So much
> like the man all the way through.”

------
FussyZeus
How is a non-compete legal anyway? You're basically saying that a person can't
get a job with a competitor in the same industry, how is anyone with any
decent skillset supposed to get a new job without somewhat violating a
noncompete?

~~~
pc86
Disregarding their use in tech or journalism, there are uses for them.

My wife and I own a gym (in addition to our full-time jobs) that has several
salaried trainers on staff. They sign a non-compete that for 1 year from the
date of termination, they cannot take a trainer job at any gym within a 5 mile
radius from our location, and they cannot own more than 20% of any gym located
within a 10 mile radius.

This prevents them from opening up shop across the street and taking half the
clients with them. It prevents them from doing the same with a nearby
competitor.

It is limited by time, has a specific geographic area, and is only for a
specific job. They can do whatever they want beyond a 10 mile radius on day 1,
or they can open up a gym on day 366 anywhere in the world.

We've never had to litigate it because it's never come up, and if someone
wasn't happy and really wanted to get a job at a Gold's two miles down the
road, we would probably let them provided they didn't spend their last week
giving our clients their new business cards or something.

~~~
kodablah
> and taking half the clients with them

I think there is a big difference here between non-compete and no-poaching
agreements. At least yours is tailored to a radius, but I don't know that your
narrow definition of non-compete is really the same.

~~~
ghaff
In principle, I agree with you. However, in practice, a lot of what drives
non-competes is concerns about poaching. I don't know if non-competes are
particularly prevalent in service industries but I'm probably most aware of
examples from consulting. I'm not going to defend non-competes but I suspect
one of the reasons that they exist is that poaching clients and use of inside
knowledge from a former employer are difficult to prove if they're not blatant
whereas working for a competitor is pretty straightforward.

------
golergka
How do you sign something first and then complain when it gets enforced? Even
if she wouldn't get fired from her next job, her getting another job in a
field covered by non-compete already shows that she didn't pay attention to
her obligations and easily violated them.

I have been in this situation myself: a company that wanted to hire me
presented me with a non-compete agreement. I naively think that I should
expect contracts and obligations that I sign to actually be upheld by all
involved parties, including myself. If I signed it, nobody would fire me from
another position — because I don't violate contracts that I sign, and I
wouldn't apply for another position in the same field.

Instead, I declined to sign it in the current form, explained my problems with
it to an HR, and one day later got an edited agreement that had a non-compete
with a reduced scope (only companies making similar products).

~~~
derekp7
The problem happens when you accept a job offer, quit your previous job, then
during new hire orientation you are given a stack of "standard HR forms" to
sign. You are never told "Take these home and have your lawyer look them over"
(how many of us even have a lawyer?), and are given the impression that
everything is boilerplate.

~~~
mikeash
People really need to learn that there's no such thing as a boilerplate
contract, everything is up for negotiation, and when somebody tells you to
sign something and not worry about it because "we never enforce that anyway"
then they're either bullshitting you or they're complete idiots.

This sort of thing ought to be taught in high school, along with other basic
adult concepts like how to get a bank account, how credit cards work, how to
vote, and how to pay taxes.

It's bizarre how such important things are left to each person to learn on
their own on an ad hoc basis.

~~~
leoedin
I don't think I really gained a good understanding of contracts until my first
employer out of university sent me on a 3 day course on contracts.

The fact that a contract is very much a legally binding document that you
can't easily walk away from is not given nearly enough emphasis in the UK
school system.

------
CyberDildonics
I was faced with a non compete clause that would have barred me from working
in the same industry for 2 years. I said I wasn't ok with. They said 'it isn't
usually enforced'. I said 'then it shouldn't be in there'. I was told 'they
don't usually allow any changes' (and this was a big company).

The result was that they did change it and send me a new contract.

Companies make a huge play for legal rights with contracts. Usually you have
wasted a lot of time to get to that point since they haven't sent you a
template in the first place. Suddenly there is an unreasonable amount that you
are giving up for the privilege of working for someone. Selective enforcement
is bullshit. Anything in the contract can be used as leverage against you if
the company doesn't like the position they are in at any particular moment.

------
zekevermillion
I find that even corporate lawyers are frequently ignorant of the laws
applicable to post-employment restrictions. In NY these covenants are
enforceable only to the extent that they protect the "legitimate business
interests" of the employer, under BDO Seidman v Hirshberg. Those interests do
not include preventing employees from practicing their trade, though some
sleazier employers seem to think that is part of the game. In this case, it
sounds like the employer is threatening some sort of trade secrets
misappropriation claim, which would not be surprising as this usually
accompanies any noncompete claim. However, it's hard to imagine what
protectable trade secrets a "content" author would learn. I mean, how to write
content is not a trade secret, it's a skill of the trade.

~~~
phonon
You can read about that here...at Law360!

[http://www.law360.com/articles/558083/bdo-seidman-
continues-...](http://www.law360.com/articles/558083/bdo-seidman-continues-to-
rule-ny-restrictive-covenants)

~~~
zekevermillion
Typical of products and services marketed toward lawyers, law360 requires a
silly subscription to read content that is largely already public info. Maybe
the trade secrets that the Reuters journalist stole have something to do with
the secret of convincing people to cross the paywall of this obnoxious
publication! Anyway, here's a Google Scholar link to the opinion, which is
self-explanatory:

[https://goo.gl/Vzq0XG](https://goo.gl/Vzq0XG)

~~~
phonon
You can read the article in full if you google the title and click the result
link.

------
NotHereNotThere
Anybody find it weird that Law360 had the journalist sign the Non-Compete on
her first day along with other HR forms?

Every time I've had job offers that included a Non-Compete, the contract was
always to be signed at the same time as the offer.

------
philjr
I am curious, given the length of time she was employed at her new employer
and her statement saying her editors were aware of this, whether this was just
the HR compliant reason she was let go.

~~~
timv
There's some confusing language in the article that might make you think that
she worked at Reuters (the new employer) for a long time. In fact she was only
there for a few weeks:

 _... who Thomson Reuters fired within weeks after hiring her in September_

The bit that confuses it is this:

 _I also later found out that every editor in my section at Reuters had been
well aware of the non-compete for years_

What I think she's saying is that the editors at her new employer were well
aware (and had been "for years") that Law360 (her old employer) used these
non-competes, and (by implication) that she'd be subject to one.

It gives the impression that she _worked there_ for years, but that seems to
just be an unintended consequence of the phrasing.

------
brightball
Perks of a right-to-work state: broad non-competes are unenforceable for
exactly this reason. You have to have specific and reasonably defined scope in
order for it to be viable.

------
gizi
The internet has completely changed contracting for me. The contract is the
email thread up to the point at which we have an agreement. If the counter-
party suggests that we sign another document than that, he is a liar and a
cheater, and I will not do business with him.

In those circumstances, non-compete clauses will have been discussed during
the mail thread. If we discussed and we agreed to them, they are valid.
Otherwise, they are not.

I do not understand that anybody would still agree to sign a contract document
drafted solely by someone else. If it was not drafted together, it is bound to
be abusive, and it is always the party who did not participate in its drafting
who will be abused.

I have always imposed my will or else walked out of bad deals, regardless of
whether the counter-party is an individual or a large company. What difference
does it make?

------
mc32
What's the situation in New York, do you have give cause? Or it it at will and
you can fire for no reason?

Interesting here is that it's the new employer firing an employee for non
compete rather than the previous employer trying to enforce it against the
signator.

~~~
chimeracoder
> What's the situation in New York, do you have give cause? Or it it at will
> and you can fire for no reason?

Generally, New York is 'at-will', though it depends on the circumstances of
employment: [http://www.ag.ny.gov/labor/can-you-be-
fired](http://www.ag.ny.gov/labor/can-you-be-fired)

Note that New York City _also_ has a some additional protections that are not
present state-wide[0]. I'm not sure if any of those come into play here.

[0] For example, discrimination against gender identity is protected in NYC
and Long Island, but not state-wide. IIRC New York also protected against
discrimination for sexual orientation before SONDA (state-wide law) was
passed.

------
coldcode
I worked at a place once that had a not only non-compete, but barred me from
buying anything from a supplier the company used (including Walmart). I
objected and crossed it out before signing. Never came up again. A lot of
these agreements are legally useless but often put in just in case it might be
useful later.

------
chrismcb
Outside of selling your company why do we have these and why are they
enforceable? Well I know why we have them, but why are they allowed to exist?
What is even worse are companies forcing noon compete on essentially unskilled
workers

------
kafkaesq
Meanwhile, the HR flackey at Law360 who incompetent advise her still has their
job:

 _When I signed the agreement, the HR representative who conducted my
orientation called it a formality and told me it just meant I couldn’t
freelance for a competing site while still working there._

~~~
csense
> who incompetent advise her

That was very competent advice from the point of the company -- the HR person
convinced her to sign the provision the company wanted her to sign, the
company didn't have to face a choice between agreeing to strike the non-
compete or letting her walk, and there was no record of the misleading "sales
pitch" the HR representative used (which might have served as evidence of
conflicting intentions, allowing a court to strike the non-compete provision
on the grounds that the parties didn't intend it to be binding, or even caused
future liability for the company if the HR rep's description of the non-
compete crossed the line between legal sales techniques "oh that's not
important, you don't want to think too hard about this part of the thing,
everybody signs it" and illegal fraudulent misrepresentation "it says X" when
it clearly it actually says Y which is totally different).

It sounds like the HR person did their job competently.

------
sparky_z
"I also later found out that every editor in my section at Reuters had been
well aware of the non-compete for years."

I thought she'd only been there for a month. What am I missing here?

~~~
srussellkraft
I later found out that other reporters had run into trouble when moving from
Law360 to Reuters, but those were before my time. Law360 has had a non-compete
since around 2011.

------
vonnik
Fwiw, non-competes are unenforceable in California.

~~~
dragonwriter
Non-competes are _mostly_ unenforceable in California. But you _definitely_
shouldn't just sign one and assume it won't be enforceable in your case.

~~~
fryguy
Assuming one did such a thing, would it be possible to take them to court and
get a summary judgement that the clause of the contract is unenforceable and
to be removed, so they can't use that as pressure against your new company as
in the instance in the article?

~~~
dragonwriter
It might be possible to commence a legal action for a _declaratory_ judgement
(a summary judgement is a different thing) on the matter (declaratory
judgement rules vary by jurisdiction.)

------
cdnsteve
Never _ever_ sign a non-compete, _ever_.

~~~
jchendy
For certain industries, that statement is equivalent to "never get a job."

~~~
st3v3r
Which is why the law needs to change to ban them completely. This isn't
something the free market is going to fix.

~~~
gozur88
Sure it is. If the employer wants you, and you refuse to sign, they'll still
hire you. If you can't find an employer who wants you badly enough, then work
in another industry.

You don't have to read very far on this page to find an example of someone who
refused to sign an NC and was still hired.

~~~
st3v3r
No it won't. And there are anecdotes, that's it. There are just as many of
people who felt they would be fired if they refused to sign.

The free market will not fix this problem while the majority of employers hold
the majority of the power in this situation.

------
st3v3r
Non-competes are immoral, and anyone who uses them deserves to be ruined so
bad they have to live under a bridge. I hope her employer gets sued into
oblivion.

