Leah Stiegler Shares Advice for Employers Amid Possible Noncompete Ban

After the FTC’s April ban on noncompete agreements and a plethora of lawsuits that followed, these infamous agreements have been in the spotlight. Leah Stiegler, a principal at Woods Rogers and management-side employment lawyer, recently spoke with Virginia Business about how employers should react in the absence of guidance.

The wait-and-see mode that employers currently find themselves in hasn’t been for nothing. “It’s at least forcing employers to take a look at what they’re doing with noncompetes and talk to legal counsel,” Leah told the publication.

According to Leah, the biggest challenge is when a company wants all of its employees to sign noncompete agreements, and there could be some issues that need to be addressed when the dust settles on what’s allowed. There are noncompetes that “should be scrapped altogether or not enforced, and noncompetes that require revisions to be more narrowly tailored and consistent with state law if the national ban doesn’t take effect.” Courts typically look at three things when deciding whether to enforce noncompetes: geographic scope, duty scope, and temporal scope. Some states, Leah points out, may impose other requirements, like a salary threshold or a stipulation about the nature of an employee’s departure from the company. 

“Noncompetes have never been a foolproof way to protect employers’ interests, and that’s become increasingly true as courts take inconsistent approaches to their enforceability, Stiegler notes. Companies still have a lot of leverage — including options that potentially have ‘more teeth’ than simply barring an employee from working for a competitor, she adds. These include confidentiality, nondisclosure, nonsolicitation, and clawback agreements, along with trade secret contracts.”

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