[lazide]

Admin assistants (like actual admin assistants) usually have access to full customer contact lists, and exposure to rather intimate details of the business and executives lives.

They’re definitely not comparable to security guards in that sense.

[toomuchtodo]

This is not enough of an excuse to encumber someone from earning a living elsewhere.

> “Employers need to get creative about how to impose restrictions to protect themselves against individuals” in whom they have made significant investments, or who have been allowed access to trade secrets, to protect themselves against such employees leaving, said Maxwell N. Shaffer, a partner with Holland & Knight LLP in Denver.

The sort of healthy employee-employer relationship that retains talent.

[lazide]

What is being banned are non-competes that don’t pay someone to not compete.

There are legitimate reasons for actual non-competes in many of these cases, and CAlifornia for instance just requires you pay them for it.

Which in such a situation seems justified.

[toomuchtodo]

I agree. If you want to pay someone to sit on the bench because that has value to you ("Garden Leave"), I support that. If you want to twist their arm because you have power as an employer, nope. That's what labor law and regulation are for.

Lots of examples of malicious employers doing the latter, as you'll note the sentiment throughout the thread comments and laws intending to patch this bug in statute.

[michaelmrose]

Why let them have that at all. The honest true is instead of worrying what strategy most balances the interests of 99.9% of people and a few whiny rich people we could spend that time creating actual value. Whereas if you want to continue on with the Rube Goldberg device we ought to force them to pay not employers present rate but market rate and cost of foregone opportunity.

You might say that's incredibly unaffordable but that is the point. Otherwise the employer is robbing society of the value created in addition to stealing the difference between present rate and market rate + foregone opportunities.

[lazide]

Because employees can be shitty people too. See my comment upthread about an up close and personal view I had to one such shitty employee.

What you seem to be advocating is to never allow a company<-> employee to have a non compete clause, even if the company is happy to pay for it.

Which yikes. Do you think what Levandowski did with Waymo/Uber helped anyone? Including ‘society’ overall?

[michaelmrose]

I don't care what they are happy to pay for. There are plenty of other tools available to protect the interests of companies. For example Levandowski stole trade secrets and is being sued for 9 figures and indicted. You couldn't have picked a worse example of the need for post employment non-competes if you tried.

Likewise your other example is an employee taking an employees money and their customers at the same time. It would have been sufficient to bar him from competing and working against the employers interests WHILE he was there.

If he had quit and called prior customers and said I know you do business with blank but I can do better would that really have been wrong?

[prirun]

> What is being banned are non-competes that don’t pay someone to not compete.

Employers will just say "the no-compete compensations is built in to your pay".

[lazide]

Which is what is banned in California. If someone wants an enforceable non-compete, they need to pay them (fairly and explicitly) for the time they’re not allowed to compete.

[lovich]

They can say anything, but the behavior has gotten enough voter anger to make politicians view this as something to regulate, so their opinion on the matter is quickly going to lose any weight

[PeterisP]

Sure, and in this case as soon as the pay stops, the non-compete obligations stop as well.

[ec109685]

There are already laws against Admin assistants from taking full customer contact lists from one job to another. You don't need non-competes to enforce that.

[lazide]

Really, which laws are those?

The only ones I’m aware of would be trade secret laws, but they’re dubiously applicable to bare customer contact lists.

You can make contractual restrictions of course (company property), but good luck being able to prove they actually took it unless they’re really dumb. Merely contacting all, or many, customers for instance wouldn’t prove it.

Being able to show they work for competitor x is easy, however, as is showing they’re pursuing customers in the same space.

[jahewson]

lol, no. Confidential business information is an area heavily protected by law. Customer lists are the canonical example.

It’s much easier to win this kind of civil suit than a criminal case. The court can absolutely crush a business that is founded in this manner to compensate the former employer.

[lazide]

Then surely you’ll have no issues providing a cite of the relevant criminal code?

[PeterisP]

Criminal code is specific to jurisdiction, in California this would probably be the most relevant section - https://codes.findlaw.com/ca/penal-code/pen-sect-499c.html . Whether a customer list is a trade secret depends on a bunch of factors in that state's (or countries) trade secret laws (the penal code is just a fraction of them) but in general a mere list of names and telephone numbers likely will not qualify, but a list that includes their buying habits or pricing of current contracts likely will.

[lazide]

Yeah no.

From your link ‘9) “Trade secret” means information, including a formula, pattern, compilation, program, device, method, technique, or process, that:

(A) Derives independent economic value, actual or potential, from not being generally known to the public or to other persons who can obtain economic value from its disclosure or use; and

(B) Is the subject of efforts that are reasonable under the circumstances to maintain its secrecy.’

Pretty hard to imagine a customer list meeting any of those criteria.

[jahewson]

I think you missed the “civil suit” part. Common law business torts are not found in statute.

[lazide]

No, I didn’t miss it. You’re moving the goalposts.

That something is a civil tort doesn’t mean it’s a criminal offense (what is generally referred to as ‘illegal’). Trade secret theft is illegal.

But trade secrets have a specific definition which can pretty much never plausibly include a list of customers.

[JackFr]

Then why didn't Dunder Mifflin sue the Michael Scott Paper Company?

[lovich]

Assuming you were asking seriously, its a comedy show that was not trying to accurately portray how businesses run.

[JackFr]

Really?

[dpkirchner]

Because they didn't reach out to the very real lawyers at Boston Legal.

[hedora]

Specifically, you can't take trade secrets from one employer to the next. Customer contact lists are just one example of this.

[lazide]

Trade secrets have a very specific definition, and a mere list of contact information that is already likely public in an unfocused way (aka contact lists) almost certainly doesn’t qualify. Neither would a list of company names, etc.

That information however IS highly valuable, especially paired with knowledge of how a company is doing sales, how it is positioning itself internally strategy wise, etc. some of those things could be trade secrets, if adequately protected, but almost no one I know would meet such a bar with how they handle it. It would be at most confidential information, and could count as a NDA violation, but would be difficult to prove unless someone was really sloppy.

[DiggyJohnson]

The idea of a client or customer list being public information is profoundly ludicrous. It’s the canonical example, as another commenter put it.

[lazide]

I never said it was public information. I saw it might be, in some cases, a collection of otherwise public information.

As to if it could be protected as a trade secret depends entirely on how it is stored, secured, what it contains, and who is given access to it.

But very unlikely. It has an actual definition [https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/trade_secret]

As to if someone could sue someone else for damages related to breach of an otherwise valid contractual obligation, then of course.

As to if such a lawsuit would be successful will of course depend on a lot of factors, including if that obligation is valid under law, if anyone can show proof it occurred (and wasn’t say someone ‘using their extensive personal connections in the industry’), etc.

But that is an expensive, time consuming, and ultimately shitty time in court with few guarantees unless someone was really sloppy.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

There are already laws against taking trade secrets/proprietary information, and using it elsewhere.

You go to jail for that. It's called "theft."

My company had us sign a ridiculous NCA. It pretty much made it impossible to get a job anywhere, after leaving the company; even if they fired you, or laid you off.

Their description of a "competitor" was so vague, that it could, literally, be applied to a 7-11, as they potentially sold peripherals that could be plugged into our devices.

[jaxn]

Every admin assistant should be under an NDA / Confidentiality agreement. Same for personal security. But those are not non-competes.

[noasaservice]

If they're that important, then the company should pay a significant percentage of their pay to keep them from doing their profession, or GTFO.

[jaxn]

I am saying that they do NOT have non-competes.