Tag Archives: pbs newshour

On July 14, 2016, PBS NewsHour featured a televised interview with Russell Beck in a story titled “A national movement against employee noncompete contracts picks up steam.”

The story, reported by Duarte Geraldino, addresses the controversy over the use of noncompete agreements. A central focus of the story is the propriety of noncompete agreements for low-wage workers.

In Russell’s interview, he describes how non-compete agreements can be used to protect trade secrets, like “[r]ecipes for cookies, profit margins, customer lists.” Russell added that “[b]illions of dollars of trade secrets are stolen on an annual basis, and there needs to be some mechanism for protecting them.”

Russell’s interview concludes with a comment that noncompetition agreements are not designed to be used “as a retention tool.”

PBS NewsHour also published a companion article titled “What you should know about noncompete agreements.” The article contains an edited transcript of Russell Beck’s entire interview.

In the article, Russell explains how companies decide whether to enforce noncompete agreements:

Different companies will enforce noncompetes for different reasons. Some will enforce them to protect their trade secrets. Some companies will enforce them to protect what are called other legitimate business interests — the protection of customer relationships that a company has invested in.

When a company comes to me and asks me whether they should enforce their noncompete, I will take a look at the agreement, understand what the facts are and advise them as to whether they should enforce it or shouldn’t enforce it. Oftentimes companies will assume that they are going to move forward with the enforcement of a noncompete, only to find out that really they shouldn’t be moving forward with it for one reason or another. Either the employee doesn’t really pose a risk, or the agreement is just not valid for some other reason.

It really comes down to the particular language of the agreement and the state that you’re in, because the jurisdiction that will control the enforcement of the agreement and may have laws that will make it hard to enforce in one state, whereas in another state it might actually be enforceable.

The full segment can be viewed below:

For up-to-the-minute analysis of legal issues concerning noncompete agreements and trade secrets in Massachusetts and across the United States, read Russell Beck’s blog, Fair Competition Law.