Redundancy and non-compete clauses

dannymahon

Posted this last night in the Employment forum but thought I would ask for more feedback here.

I have just been made redundant from a role in which i have 3 months notice. My company is trying to hold me to a clause in my contract which states I cannot work for a competitor for 12 months.

As my role has been made redundant I do not see how they can enforce this. The sector is marketing in online gambling.

I doubt they can even enforce this for a day and therefore will try and use this as a negotiation for a bigger pay out. Do any legal bods have any advice for me before I go in all guns blazing tomorrow!

I have a call in an hour with them where I suspect they will push for me to sign something on leaving which suggests I sign another agreement statement stating I wont work for a rival for 12 months.

Thanks

Annisele

I know I'm a bit late, as you've already made your call. An hour doesn't give all that long for peeps to reply! However, I'm afraid that however long you give us you're unlikely to get much beyond what SarEl said in your other thread.

On the face of it, if there's a clause in your contract that says X, then that clause is potentially enforceable. If you decide to ignore that you promised X when you joined the firm, then the only way you'll find out for certain if the clause is enforceable or not is if a court ends up making a judgement. Whatever the answer is, that's an expensive way of finding out whether or not you're right.

You can do some googling for general information on restraint of trade clauses, but that won't tell you whether the particular clause that you have is likely to be enforceable given the particular situation you're in. And after SarEl's haulage handler, I'd be very wary of pushing things if your company is litigious - "all guns blazing" may not be the best strategy.

I'd also be wary of statements like "it being my only career choice" (from your other thread). That's clearly not true - you might not want to retrain, and you might not want to go work in McDonalds or similar, but you could.

I should stress that I'm not a lawyer, so the above is just my uneducated opinion. SarEl is a barrister (or at least, she says she is - this is the internet after all!) and I think you should take the warnings she gave you seriously.