When an employee leaves your business, is he or she taking things along that you would rather not give up? Is the employee going to open up in competition with you, or try to steal your customers, or employ secret processes that are a source of your competitive advantage? Obviously, no employer wants to lose an employee under those circumstances.
One way to avoid this is to enter into agreements with your employees that restrict their rights to compete with you. You can make such an agreement a condition of employment, if you wish.
The attached file contains several examples of noncompete agreements that provide samples of the general language that you would expect to find in noncompete agreements for executives, professionals, artists, and inventors. Because of the variances in state law on noncompete agreements, legal counsel should be sought before drafting any noncompete agreement. The content of a noncompete agreement should be individually tailored to fit each company's particular circumstances.
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The file is in rich text format (RTF) that is suitable for use with most word processing programs used in the Windows environment.
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Noncompete agreement
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Noncompete Agreements
