[rkangel]

I work for a consultancy in the UK. Occasionally someone leaves us to join a client. Our contracts with our clients prevent "solicitation" i.e. trying to encourage some to leave us to join them.

In practice we never use those clauses - it's almost always better to maintain good relationships and reputation with clients. Plus it's legal for our employees to move jobs to them, it's just the solicitation bit that's not allowed.

There was a case at my previous company (that happened before I was there) where a client that wasn't paying for work done, also tried to get the entire project team to leave and join them. They did this by emailing their work email address thereby handing us incontrovertible evidence of breach of contract. This was used as additional legal ammunition to force them to actually pay us. It never made it to court or anything.

[amerkhalid]

> Our contracts with our clients prevent "solicitation" i.e. trying to encourage some to leave us to join them.

I have seen same thing, it is no solicitation but if someone joins on their own then it is not a breach of contract. In fact, I learned about this because once I asked one of our vendor (also friend) to apply for a job in our company, in front of my boss. My boss immediately corrected me that we cannot make such a comment.

Later she told me it is totally fine if he applied on his own but any hint of solicitation from us will disqualify him or get us in trouble.

Also with the same vendor, I had seen their people joining our company quite a bit. And they continued to do business with us.