Welcome to AccelPro Employment Law, where we provide expert interviews and coaching to accelerate your professional development. Today we’re featuring a conversation about non-compete agreements. Our guest is Jay Zweig, a partner at Ballard Spahr who has been an employment attorney for more than two decades.
Non-compete agreements, as well as other restrictive covenants like non-solicitation agreements and confidentiality agreements, have drawn a lot of attention in recent years because of changing workplace norms in the post-Covid world. The FTC and NLRB also have hinted they will pursue nationwide bans.
Zweig says the key to an effective and enforceable non-compete agreement is that it has to be reasonable in terms of who gets it, what it covers and how long it lasts. He advises his clients to be circumspect about which employees to ask to sign non-competes. The CEO? Yes. The CEO’s receptionist? Not so much.
He also pushes his clients—sometimes they don’t like it—to be less aggressive than they might want to be in terms of how long the non-compete lasts after an employee leaves. If it’s longer than a year, a court might deem it unenforceable—the very definition of unreasonable.
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