Through the Garden, Across the Pond, and Beyond: Comparing Noncompetes with Garden Leave and Trade Secret Law

By: Kathleen Fink

PDF: Through the Garden

Legal systems across the globe have been reevaluating employee noncompetes and their impacts on economies, employee mobility, and employers’ confidential information. Many employers include noncompetes in employment contracts in efforts to protect their trade secrets, yet these agreements may be unenforceable or harmful to both employees and the economy. This poses a solution that effectively balances employees’ interest in labor mobility with employers’ interests in protecting their confidential information, including trade secrets. This Note takes a transnational approach, analyzing various countries’ attempts to balance these interests—Mexico’s approach of relying on trade secret law and not allowing noncompetes, Japan’s reasonableness standard, and the United Kingdom’s practice of garden leave, under which employees remain employed while insulated from the employer’s trade secrets for a set period. This Note advocates for garden leave as a better alternative to noncompetes by protecting employers while fairly compensating employees.