There is so much going on from a legal perspective on issues impacting the animal health world that I had almost too many options to choose from for this update. But I wanted to focus here on a few legal issues that frankly impact all business regardless of industry — restrictive employee covenants and trade secret protections. I would submit that these issues may have disparate and more pronounced impacts in animal health than other industries such as for recipes, formulations, processing techniques and know-how, and specific customer requirements for your deliverables.
For decades, employment agreements containing restrictive covenants — namely, non-competes, non-solicitation and non-disclosure clauses — have been a preferred tool for employers to legally limit the possible use of their proprietary and confidential business information by competitors, as well as prevent their star employees from taking their talents to a competitor. Principally, companies lean on restrictive covenants because, like it or not, the vast majority of trade secret loss or misappropriation comes from employees leaving the company with data and protected information and seeking to use that information in their next employment. So long as the restrictive covenants were sufficiently narrow in scope as to geography, topic (or role) and time, employers had a reasonable expectation that courts would enforce them.
