Are Non-Competes a Good Idea? Depends On Whom You Talk To
In the most recent season finale of HBO’s Silicon Valley, the lead character, Richard Hendricks, appeared to be on the verge of losing the rights to his company’s intellectual property in arbitration to a previous employer, a thinly-disguised caricature of Google called Hooli. Hendricks’s employment contract clearly gave Hooli the rights to the IP. To the surprise of everyone, the arbitrator ruled that, since Hooli’s employment contract contained a non-competition clause, the
