Don’t Forget These in Your Employment Contracts

We tend to think of employment contracts as standard, boilerplate documents that you can get off the internet. But that’s not true–in fact, having an employment agreement that is insufficient or poorly worded or incomplete, can lead to a lot of legal troubles down the road.

Do You Even Want to Provide One?

One question to ask is whether or not you even want to provide a contract to employees or prospective hires. Doing so eliminates the employee’s at-will employment status. Of course, having a contract also gives you, as the employer, some security and protections as well.

Employee or Contractor?

Whether you’re doing it purposely to try to evade applicable laws or whether it’s just an accident, don’t mislabel employees as independent contractors, or vice-versa.

Treating one like the other incorrectly, can lead to very serious legal troubles. And it doesn’t matter what your employment contract says–the law has specific definitions of what an employee or contractor is or is not regardless of what you call that particular employee.

Personal Devices

You may have or need an official personal device policy or not, but the fact is that most employees will, to some extent, use their personal devices to do business, even if it’s just responding to your work texts or emails.

Because it’s a personal device, the employee may argue that anything on that device is theirs. But what if there is important or private trade secret or confidential information that you’ve texted or emailed, which can be accessed on that personal device?

You’ll want to include something in your employment contract that addresses this issue, and how that information will be accessed, deleted, or handled, when employment ends.

Forgetting You’re in Different States

If you do business in multiple states, things can be very different, from workers’ compensation laws, to what a trade secret is, to how much you can limit an employee’s ability to work when employment with your company ends.

Don’t be focused just on what office you’re in; if you do business in, or have employees in other states, you’ll need to make sure that your contract is enforceable under the laws of other states as well.

Defining Trade Secrets

It’s easy to protect “trade secrets” or “confidential information,” but what do those terms actually mean?

You’ll want to define what the trade secrets are, or what information you are protecting–and you want to be specific enough to identify the information being protected, without being so specific you’re giving away the trade secret in the employment agreement itself.

When it comes to customer lists, you also may want to define what customers are “yours,” and which (if any) the employee gets to take with him or her, or to contact freely, when employment ends.

Third Party Injunctions

If you have any kind of restriction on the employee working elsewhere after employment ends, or you’re trying to protect trade secrets, you’ll not only want that enforceable as against your employee, but also, against any third party company that may hire that employee after he or she leaves you, or any other employee that may get access to your customer lists or trade secrets, through that now-former employee.

Employment contracts are important documents. Let us help draft them for you. Call our West Palm Beach commercial litigation attorneys at Pike & Lustig for help.