I recently received a job offer and while reviewing my offer I noticed I would have to sign a non-compete agreement, which is an industry standard. I asked the recruiter if I would be able to read the non-compete before accepting the role and was met with some resistance. I wanted to know if all non-compete agreements are the same or if companies can modify them to be more restrictive?
Does anyone have any experiences with non-compete agreements and would be willing to explain/elaborate?
Thanks,
Matt
I recently received a job offer and while reviewing my offer I noticed I would have to sign a non-compete agreement, which is an industry standard. I asked the recruiter if I would be able to read the non-compete before accepting the role and was met with some resistance. I wanted to know if all non-compete agreements are the same or if companies can modify them to be more restrictive?
Does anyone have any experiences with non-compete agreements and would be willing to explain/elaborate?
Thanks,
Matt
I do not work in the medical device industry and this was the first time I have heard of such a clause. I looked it up to do some more research on it and I was surprised to see such an agreement. the specific definition you can find online is:
A non-compete agreement is a legal agreement or clause in a contract specifying that an employee must not enter into competition with an employer after the employment period is over
I also saw that there is basis to enter court and sue if a company choses to so, should you break the agreement. However, one important consideration is that this is only enforceable if it a reasonable time frame. Generally non competes can hold for about one year, but going past that is difficult to hold in court.
To my understanding, a non-compete agreement is a document used to "prevent" employees from leaving their current company and working with another competitor, usually equal in size. However, from what I have read they are rarely enforced because it would be unreasonable to bar anyone from trying to earn a living. Non-compete agreements take a stronger importance when dealing with company intellectual property or confidential information, which of course your current company would not want to share with a competitor. With that said, the agreement is more of a "catch all" to prevent any unlawful sharing of information across companies and signing it shouldn't really be a problem.
I had somewhat of a similar experience as well when first receiving my offer letter as well. After speaking to someone with a law and business background they informed me that this clause simply states that I cannot start my own company and take the current company's clients/customers. After finding this out, I had no reservations about signing onto my current company. I'm not sure if this is a standard for other medical device companies as well or if they can make their's more restrictive but it definitely helped that I had the full paperwork given to me in my acceptance offer package and I was able to carefully read through all of the paperwork.
More information about the non-compete agreement should be found in that paperwork itself, and it may be helpful to sit down with an lawyer/attorney or someone with a background in law and business to really understand what you may be singing into.
I have never encountered a non-compete agreement but I have been asked to sign non-disclosure agreements. Does anyone know the difference between the two? From what I understand, NCA is just a one-way contract to prevent employees from disclosing information that would cause unfair competition, while an NDA is a mutual agreement to protect confidential and private information from the public and other competitors. Why choose one over the other? Are there situations when both are required?
I believe in my experience in the pharma industry, a non-compete agreement is a specific document that prevents an individual employee from taking the companies intellectual property that they have learned from or gained in their profession and time in the company and taking it elsewhere to do business with. I believe in practice it is very difficult to prosecute someone for violating the non-compete agreement as it is very hard to prove that a company has gained this knowledge from specifically that employee of if it was indeed a company wide effort. However for most people, the act of signing this document is usually enough to thwart employees from taking company property elsewhere. In your opinion what would be some avenues that a company could take to prove that a non-compete agreement has been violated.
Non-compete agreements are pretty common in any industry. In the jobs I've worked, each one had a non-compete agreement that I was required to sign before working. This agreement basically protects the company from an individual taking all their knowledge from the company and, after being done with the company, using those "secrets" with another company, such as their competitors. This document is pretty standard across the industry and has generally the same standards in the agreement. One thing I've noticed that might change is the length of time for which the agreement is enforceable; some companies tend to make this time frame longer or shorter. Some employers can make this non-competency more restrictive in one way: the geographic location can be restricted to where the individual can work in reference to the employer. Non-compete agreements can also target a specific industry, such as the manufacturing of a certain chemical, and this non-compete would limit the amount of work this person can do. I've also noticed some states are more lenient with their non-compete agreements, such as Oklahoma, where workers in specific industries are so lenient that if a non-compete agreement is enforced, the person won't be able to work for years, making it impossible to work for another company. Such as if the person works as an electrician and there aren't many electric companies, which makes the person looking for work impossible, so the non-compete agreement is much more lax in some of the states.
Non-compete agreements typically barr you from working with a competitor on a similar product that you had previously worked on. In my experience, it was not an umbrella restriction that prevented you from moving into a job that was in the same industry as your previous employer, but rather on the same specific product(s) you worked on. In my case, it was the details of confidential information about a clinical trial sponsor's drug or what it did. This NDAs or non-competes usually are set with some type of timeline so that it is reasonably inferred it can be enforced as a valid concern (aka it is not a lifetime appointment that you are signing).
