3 ms·
My wife was sued by the very large company she worked for under a non-compete after she went to a company that they saw as a competitor. They sued her in Texas
by technothrasher 2y ago
My wife was sued by the very large company she worked for under a non-compete after she went to a company that they saw as a competitor. They sued her in Texas (even though she worked for them in a Northeast state) and the two companies spent $500K battling it out before it even made it to discovery. We were out $20K personally just in legal fees to have an independent lawyer advising us. Neither company cared about her particularly, but were really fighting each other. When the old employer successfully got an injunction against her, then moved the case to Federal court, and laid out what the first year of the case was going to look like (while she was unable to work at all because of the injunction), she pulled the plug and settled with her old company with an incredibly one sided agreement, basically hamstringing her from working in the industry for the next 18 months.
So, yes, they are sometimes enforced.
- shishy 2y agoWhat line of work was she in? How awful
- technothrasher 2y agoProduct management
- dmix 2y agoJeez those two companies must have really hated each other. That sort of legal investment is usually a personal thing by CEOs as much as about business.
- technothrasher 2y agoThe new company was in California, where there are stricter non-compete laws, and had been poaching people from the old company. They were at the point, I think, where they both wanted to get federal precedent on non-competes to settle matters. This is what one of the lawyers in Texas told us (we had lawyers in three different states working on "our" team), when he suggested we might not want to play defendant in that game.