The matter concerned a two-year non-solicit covenant signed by a sales executive at the time of joining a B2B services firm. On her departure, the firm sought to enforce the covenant against not only her direct customer relationships, but the entire customer book of the team she had once managed.<\/p>
The legal question was narrow: whether a non-solicit clause drafted to capture relationships the executive had merely supervised, not personally cultivated, was enforceable. The bench had not previously ruled clearly on this distinction in the local jurisdiction, and the matter offered both sides an opportunity to test it.<\/p>
We argued for narrow construction. The bench agreed: the covenant was enforceable against direct relationships only, and unenforceable against the wider book. The order is unpublished, but the reasoning has informed several subsequent matters before our chambers.<\/p>
The takeaway, internally: non-solicit clauses are enforced; over-broad non-solicit clauses are read down. The drafting matters.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Successfully struck down an over-broad two-year non-solicit covenant before the appellate tribunal. Set a useful internal precedent for the chambers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":36,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.fasterthemes.com\/legal-wordpress-theme\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.fasterthemes.com\/legal-wordpress-theme\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.fasterthemes.com\/legal-wordpress-theme\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.fasterthemes.com\/legal-wordpress-theme\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/demo.fasterthemes.com\/legal-wordpress-theme\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18,"href":"https:\/\/demo.fasterthemes.com\/legal-wordpress-theme\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13\/revisions\/18"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.fasterthemes.com\/legal-wordpress-theme\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.fasterthemes.com\/legal-wordpress-theme\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.fasterthemes.com\/legal-wordpress-theme\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.fasterthemes.com\/legal-wordpress-theme\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}