The writing is on the wall: remote work is here to stay. According to data collected by Ladders, three million professional jobs in the US went permanently remote in the fourth quarter 2021 alone. By the end of 2021, 18 percent of all professional jobs in the US were remote. Ladders projects that number will be close to 25 percent by the end of 2022. Of course, this leaves employment lawyers and HR professionals wondering — what employment laws apply to our distributed workforce?
One particularly thorny issue facing employers in this context is the permissibility of post-termination non-competition agreements. Non-compete laws and their requirements differ greatly from state to state. For example, in Illinois, one of the requirements is that the employee must earn at least $75,000 annually in order to enter into an enforceable post-termination non-compete, but in Oregon, that minimum annual income threshold increases to $100,533 — and that same employee would be subject to no income threshold if Missouri law applied. On the other hand, in Colorado, where post-termination non-competes are generally unlawful, the employer could soon face misdemeanor criminal liability for seeking to enforce an unlawful post-termination non-compete against any employee, and in California, the employer could be exposed to compensatory and punitive damages if a claim is accompanied by other deemed tortious conduct (e.g., interference with the employee’s future employment prospects by seeking to enforce the unlawful agreement).
In this post, we analyze how remote work further muddles the already complicated landscape of post-termination non-competes and how employers can best navigate this complex backdrop.
What law applies? Guidance from recent case law
One issue arising out of remote work is knowing what state’s law will apply when it comes to the enforceability of non-compete restrictions. With remote work, long gone are the days where an employer can be relatively certain that the state where an employee is located at the beginning of the employment relationship will be the same state that employee is living and working in at the end of the employment relationship. As a result, when the need to enforce non-compete restrictions arises, the parties may dispute what state’s law should apply to the non-compete (e.g., the state where the employee was located when they entered into the contract, the state where the employee began work for the employer, or the state whether the employee was living or working at the end of the employment relationship).Continue Reading Navigating The Intersection Of Remote Work And State-Specific Post-Termination Non-Compete Laws
California courts mostly take a no prisoners approach to Business and Professions Code section 16600, the statute prohibiting illegal restraints on trade. Courts broadly interpret Section 16600, which states that “every contract by which anyone is restrained from engaging in a lawful profession, trade, or business of any kind is to that extent void,” to invalidate most post-employment non-competes and customer non-solicits, including covenants preventing former employees or their new employers from “hiring” employees of a former employer (so-called “no hire agreements”). But Section 16600 does not bar all post-employment covenants–just those that “restrain” trade.
