Here at the Law Office of Vincent Miletti, Esq. and the home of the #UnusuallyMotivated movement, we take pride as a resilient and dependable legal services firm, providing such services in both a traditional and online, web-based environment. With mastered specialization in areas such as Employment and Labor Law, Intellectual Property (IP) (trademark, copyright, patent), Entertainment Law, and e-Commerce (Supply Chain, Distribution, Fulfillment, Standard Legal & Regulatory), we provide a range of legal services including, but not limited to traditional legal representation (litigation, mediation, arbitration, opinion letters and advisory), non-litigated business legal representation and legal counsel, and unique, online legal services such as smart forms, mobile training, legal marketing and development.

Still, we, here at Miletti Law®, feel obligated to enlighten, educate, and create awareness, free of charge, about how these issues and many others affect our unusually motivated® readers and/or their businesses. Accordingly, in order to achieve this goal, and as part of our continued commitment to you, we have committed ourselves to creating authoritative, trustworthy & distinctive content, which is featured as videos that are posted on our YouTube Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtvUryqkkMAJLwrLu2BBt6w and blogs that are published on our website WWW.MILETTILAW.COM. With that, the ball is in your court and you have an effortless obligation to subscribe to the channel and sign up for the Newsletter on the website, which encompasses the best way to ensure that you stay in the loop and feel the positive impact of the knowledge bombs that we drop here!

Bound by the commitment to update our various series with fresh, verifiable, and credible content, which looks to not only educate, but also deliver in a sense that only Miletti Law® can, this blog introduces you to our video titled “Restrictive Covenants Made Easy.” By way of backdrop, we found it necessary to make this video as a way of responding to questions and concerns from our clients regarding what to do when hiring somebody, but this someone has a non-compete clause or they want to institute a non-compete clause in their company or some other type of business. Naturally, most people opt for non-competes because we are increasingly becoming a more competitive as a society. Further, as society grows broader and broader, services continually overlap greatly and, as the economy develops, techniques become narrower and narrower. Just as the terms suggest, a restrictive covenant implies to a covenant where you restrict a person from doing something, or alternatively, commit a person to not do something. Restrictive covenant started as common law, but at some point it has become more common and common to the extent of becoming contract law (private law between parties entering into a contract).

The Ingredients For Restrictive Covenants

There are five key ingredients for restrictive convents. These include:

  • They must be reasonable in time. It is illogical to have a restriction that lasts for a billion years. Generally, any restrictive covenant made to last up to one year is presumably reasonable. However, the further out the restriction goes from 1 year and beyond, the more it becomes unreasonable.
  • They must be reasonable in scope. For instance, if you work for an Amazon (an e-commerce) company, then a restrictive covenant that says you are restricted from work for another company that operates on e-commerce platforms is unreasonable.
  • It must not unreasonably burden the employee. If an employee is unable to participate in society as a normal citizen because of the burden created by a restrictive covenant, then such a restrictive covenant is unreasonable.
  • It must not be harmful to the general public. Again, a restrictive covenant that imposes harm to the general public should be scrapped off. For instance, a restrictive covenant that bars doctors and nurses from working for public healthcare organizations in the country is undesirable and unreasonable.
  • It must be necessary to protect the legitimate interest of the employer. By necessary, we imply that there must not be any other methods that are significantly less restrictive to protect certain legitimate interests. For instance, customer relationships and goodwill in business are perfect examples of such legitimate interests that need to be protected. Another thing that has been identified by courts as a legitimate interest of the employer entails the obligation to preventing the disclosure of confidential and/or proprietary information, trade secrets, or confidential consumer information. Further, courts have also identified as a legitimate interest of the employer encompasses the employee services that are considered unique and extraordinary to the employer. For instance, if you work for a company and you have designed a unique management software for their systems, which gives the company a competitive advantage, then the employer has a legitimate interest to protect your services as an employee.

With this information, we hope that you are now at a better position to understand restrictive covenants. Otherwise, we invite you to view our video accessible through https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09Bb5CO9FW8 and hear it directly from the horse’s mouth.

Stay tuned for more guidance, enlightenment, and counsel. In the interim, reach us out at the Contact Us page for answers to your questions and/or comments and business legal representation.

Always rising above the bar,

Isaac T.,

Legal Writer & Author.