Wilmington Employment Law Blog

“We wanted to send a message,” a jury foreman told reporters in the wake of a recently rendered verdict in an employment-linked matter.

Message received.

Short answer to the above-posed headline query leading off today’s blog post: You might have.

A recurrent scenario plays out daily in Delaware workplaces and other employment locales spanning the country. Word ripples across a company that a top-tier employee has lost his or her job.

The above-posed headline query in today’s blog post is certainly not intended as a trick question. Readers of our long-tenured multi-practice Delaware law firm might reasonably intuit that there is no simple and definitive answer to the question, though.

In short, the employment agreements executed between management and workers in Delaware companies and nationally are variable and notably differentiated. Some contracts are flatly concise instruments that set forth wage and benefit matters and little else. Conversely, others – especially agreements signed by high-level employees – often run to many pages and encompass subject matter that is widely varied.

Select workers in many Delaware businesses are intimately involved at high levels in matters concerning their employers’ policies, business plans and proprietary data. Company principals know that, while such employees are key assets to their enterprises, they can also prove detrimental if they quit their jobs absent any post-termination controls on their knowledge or ability to compete.

A worker unfettered by legal constraints might establish a directly competing business just down the road, for example, piggybacking on knowledge gained at his or her prior job. Conversely, that worker might commence employment with a business rival, imparting to that entity information/data deemed proprietary by the previous employer.