NDA with a non-compete clause: 30,000 euro indemnity

Eliza Hall wrote:

It's not hard to prove you breached a noncompete. Any source of information showing that you worked for a competitor, poached a customer or lured away an employee during the covered time period can work as evidence. But the main use of noncompetes is not taking people to court for damages -- it's persuading them to stop, or persuading the third parties involved with them (poached customers or employees) to stop being involved with them, by merely threatening a lawsuit.

And that's why overbroad noncompetes are so dangerous. 98% of freelancers and their customers do NOT want to invest the money to fight such a lawsuit, even if they had that much money to spare, which they often don't. So the typical way it works is: A employee signs a noncompete with B company; A then goes to work for C, a competitor of B; B sends C a letter saying that A is subject to a noncompete that would be violated if A works for C; and therefore C fires A in order to avoid being sued for interfering with A's noncompete.

The broader your noncompete, the more likely B is to send a letter to C in the above example, and the more likely C is to take it seriously and fire A as a result. If it's narrower -- if C can see right off the bat that the noncompete ended last month, for instance, or doesn't cover the geographic location where C is -- the harder it is for B to abuse it.

Chris S wrote:


Not in the freelance world, surely?
How could an agency know for certain that I’m working directly for their customer? They might have their suspicions, but neither I nor the customer would exactly be shouting about it. So how could they prove it?