There's a necessary distinction to be made between non-solicitation pacts between companies - a definite antitrust concern - and the non-solicitation clauses in

There's a necessary distinction to be made between non-solicitation pacts between companies - a definite antitrust concern - and the non-solicitation clauses in company-to-individual employment/separation agreements. The company-to-company pacts are suspect enough, as some of the messages in these cases show, that executives feared creating a paper trail. The company-to-employee agreements are different. Those clauses typically limit an individual from recruiting coworkers to a new employer, for a limited time. As far as I know, these are legal in most places, apparently even in California, and aren't done surreptitiously at all: they're clearly spelled out in employment-related contracts. (Some of the Pando reporting, in trying to cast some Google documents in the worst possible light, seems confused on this matter. They call a passage that's clearly referring to such employee contractual obligations to former employers as a "a rather cryptic warning suggesting that all across industries, illegal non-solicitation agreements were common everywhere" and "a stunning example of… flagrantly illegal practices". No, that's just referring to a common and legal non-solicitation clause of many employment agreements. See, for example, http://www.pepperlaw.com/publications_update.aspx?ArticleKey=408 http://www.pepperlaw.com/publications_update.aspx?ArticleKey... )