Moving to a competitor—issues for employees

Published by a UU��ֱ�� Employment expert

Practice notes

Moving to a competitor—issues for employees

Published by a UU��ֱ�� Employment expert

Practice notes

This Practice Note considers the legal and practical issues that may arise when an employee wishes to leave their current employment and move to work for a competitor. The note envisages that the competitor may be a pre-existing organisation, or a new business set up by the employee (acting alone, or with others, such as fellow employees) to undertake the competitive activity.

Contract of employment and other documents

The first step when advising an employee who is considering leaving their current employee for a competitor is to consider the terms of the contract of employment, and to ascertain the duties and restrictions that apply to the employee.

Ideally, the employee will have been well-advised when they entered into the contract in the first place, as, depending on the relative bargaining power of the parties, this is obviously the best time to negotiate any duties provisions and post-termination restrictions so that they are a sensible compromise between the employer's interests and those of the employee.

However, in many cases, the employee will not have scrutinised the post-termination

Jurisdiction(s):

United Kingdom

Key definition:

Activity definition

What does Activity mean?

1 The rate at which radioactive material disintegrates or decays per unit time. The units can be measured as either a Curie (Ci) or a Becquerel (Bq). 2 An activity involving radioactive material that requires a licence.

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