Every employer should consider a number of things when it comes to notice and posting requisites in regard to new hires. The law requires employers to provide employees with notices of the employer’s policies on working hours, holidays, personal leave, vacation, and sick leave. Specifically, employers in New York are required to create and provide employees with postings with information, including, but not limited to, equal pay, sexual harassment, workers’ compensation, unemployment insurance, discrimination, and minimum wage.
To move this discussion forward, this blog post aims to discuss why an employer should consider executing restrictive covenants during the process of new employee hiring and onboarding.
New York Labor Laws on Executing Restrictive Covenants during New Employee Hiring & Onboarding
Today, most start-up and growing businesses use massive resources and incur very high costs building a base of customers, training their workforces, and developing intellectual property (such as copyrights, moral rights, trademarks, patents, and trade secrets). It goes without saying that all of these require to be guarded and protected from intrusion, theft, or misappropriation by unauthorized personnel.
In our blog post titled “Fundamental Aspects of Restrictive Covenants!,” we mentioned that restrictive covenants are contractual devices that employers may utilize to safeguard their employee, client, and customer relationships, trade secret, proprietary, or confidential information, and other competitive interests. This means that through such a covenant, an employee’s ability to solicit employees and/or clients of the employer, compete with their employer, and disclose or use the employer’s trade secrets or other confidential information after termination is limited.
Thus, to prevent them, following employment separation, from soliciting other employees to leave the business, soliciting clients/customers, misappropriating a company’s confidential information or trade secrets, or working for a competitor, employers need to execute restrictive covenants with new hires. Most importantly, they need to seek expert advice on how to draft restrictive covenants and the legal implications of doing the same.
In Part XXIII of the series, we will, in our blog post titled “New Employee Hiring & Onboarding: Drafting Non-Compete Agreements,” hammer on what employers, particularly new ones, should be cognizant of and consider when it comes to drafting and executing non-compete agreements.
As usual, stay tuned for more legal guidance, training, and education. In the interim, if there are any questions or comments, please let us know at the Contact Us page!
Always Rising Above the Bar,
Isaac T.,
Legal Writer, Author, and Publisher.