St. Croix Valley Employers Association Annual Conference

Successful businesses have put in significant amounts of work to set themselves apart from others and employees are almost always integral to that success. The thought of an integral employee leaving a business is frightening. Are they going to start a competitive business? Are they going to persuade clients and/or co-workers to leave? Will they share and/or use your confidential and proprietary business to help make another business successful? While these are scary questions, a well-crafted confidentiality, non-solicitation, and non-competition the agreement can quell these concerns.

Currently, the regulation of non-competition agreements has been left to individual states. Some states outright ban non-competition agreements. In Wisconsin, an agreement that is not well-drafted and/or that is overly broad could mean that the entire agreement is invalid and that a business has little protection from the departing employee.

Recently, President Biden has contemplated a national response to non-competition agreements by signing an “Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy” on July 9^th which included a call to “curtail the unfair use of non-compete clauses and other clauses or agreements that may unfairly limit worker mobility.”

This presentation will give an overview of the national climate surrounding non-competition agreements and then will take a deeper dive into Wisconsin’s specifics. This presentation will help you draft and/or tailor your current non-competition agreements and also help you identify when you should seek outside review.