Goodwill Protection & Competition Issues

The most valuable assets of staffing companies are their intangible assets—customer lists, client contacts, price lists, candidate data, methods, and other propriety business practices. In the highly competitive staffing industry, protecting trade secrets and confidential information is vital to running a staffing company and remaining competitive in the market. Protecting such proprietary information requires processes, contracts, handbooks, and vigilance. These measures extend to key staffing company employees. Our team helps our staffing clients adopt strong confidentiality measures, implement effective policies and agreements, and practice consistent enforcement to ensure their proprietary information remains a valuable company asset.

​We help staffing companies ensure that their recruiters and sales staff have adequate restrictive covenants. Such restrictive covenants generally take the form of non-competition covenants designed to protect the staffing company from a recruiter or salesperson leaving to work for a competitor and non-solicitation agreements designed to ensure that recruiters and salespeople. If they do leave, they do not take clients or candidates to a new employer and, most importantly, covenants designed to prohibit the use and disclosure of the staffing company’s confidential and proprietary business information. Typically, courts, regardless of jurisdiction, are more likely to enforce confidentiality covenants as written as opposed to the other restrictive covenants. Accordingly, we help our clients create and implement policies to identify, label, and protect their confidential and proprietary information. Further, we advise staffing companies regarding best practices related to onboarding new key employees with respect to restrictive covenants accompanying such new hires.

We also counsel staffing companies regarding protection of their other intellectual property, including copyrights, privacy issues, and trademarks.