Employment
Executive restrictive covenants after the enforcement retreat
The twelve-month covenant that will be argued about is worth less than the six-month covenant that will be observed.
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Practice Area
The employment questions that reach us are rarely about employment law. They are about whether a company can make a change without losing the people who make it work.
Practice contacts
We advise employers on senior hiring and departure, incentive and compensation arrangements, restrictive covenants, and the workforce dimension of acquisitions and reorganizations. We separately advise individual executives — never both sides of the same matter.
We conduct workplace investigations at board and senior management level. Most such investigations fail for two reasons: the scope is drafted too narrowly to answer the question the board actually has, and the report is written before anyone has decided who will read it. We settle both before starting.
On transactions, we handle consultation obligations, benefit harmonization, and the post-closing integration mechanics that decide whether an acquired business still functions four months later.
Capabilities
Hiring, departure, and separation terms at chief executive and board level, including the disclosure and timing questions that attach to public companies.
Drafting, enforcement, and defense across jurisdictions with materially different enforcement postures.
Board-level investigations with agreed scope, reporting format, and a defined audience settled before work begins.
Equity and long-term incentive arrangements, clawback provisions, and the treatment of awards on a change of control.
Consultation obligations, transfer of employment, benefit harmonization, and post-closing integration.
The team
Representative Matters
A specialty materials division across nine countries, sold to a private capital buyer with sixty percent of its operations still running on the parent's systems.
A departure that had to be announced, a covenant that had to be enforced, and a business that had to keep its clients through both.
Industries
Banks, asset managers, insurers, and the payments businesses now regulated like all three.
Providers, device manufacturers, and diagnostics businesses operating under clinical and commercial obligations at once.
Manufacturers, distributors, and consumer businesses, many of them family-controlled.
Universities, foundations, cultural institutions, and the investment offices that support them.
Speak to the firm
Describe the matter in general terms and name the parties involved. We run a conflicts check, usually within two business days, and a partner in the relevant practice will call you. The first conversation is not charged.