Mass Law Blog

Nudge, Nudge, Wink, Wink – Are You “Soliciting” in Violation of an Employee Non-Solicitation Agreement?

by | Jul 2, 2013

Two note-worthy decisions have emerged from AMD v. Feldstein, a trade secret case pending in federal district court in Massachusetts. At the heart of the case is the conduct of several AMD employees who left to work for Nvidia Corporation. Inexplicably, they copied and took with them huge amounts of AMD data, actions which earned them a preliminary injunction in the first of two opinions, dated May 15, 2013.

However, in the May 15th decision Massachusetts federal district court judge Timothy Hillman also addressed the thorny issue of  what constitutes a “solicitation” in violation of a non-solicitation agreement, and specifically solicitation of employees (as opposed to customers) of the former employer.

The employee non-solicitation provisions in this case were fairly standard. For example, Feldstein’s provided that:

during [Feldstein’s] employment with [AMD] and for a period of one year following the termination of [Feldstein’s] employment, whether voluntary or involuntary, [Feldstein would] not hire or attempt to hire an employee of [AMD], or directly or indirectly solicit, induce or encourage an employee of [AMD] to leave his or her employ to work for another employer, without first getting the written consent of an Officer of [AMD].

However, just what kinds of behavior violate such a provision, and which do not?

Clearly, expressly asking or encouraging an AMD employee to leave AMD would do so (“you should leave AMD and come to work for Nvidia with me – you can make much more money there, and they have chair massages every day!”). But what if Feldstein, on his last day of work at AMD, tells another employee “I’m moving to Nvidia” and winks? What if, after he’s at Nvidia, he has  lunch with a former co-worker at AMD and raves about how much he likes his new job, nothing more? What if, once Feldstein is at Nvidia a former co-worker at AMD approaches him and asks him questions about salary and working conditions at Nvidia, and whether there are any more job openings, and he does nothing more than answer these questions? What if Feldstein encourages an AMD employee to move to Nvidia, but the employee was unhappy at AMD, and was planning to leave in any event? The permutations are almost endless.

These examples pose perplexing problems for employers and employees alike, who must try to navigate a thin line between legal and illegal behavior.*

*As the Massachusetts Appeals Court stated in a case involving the alleged solicitation of customers, “as a practical matter, the difference between accepting and receiving business, on the one hand, and indirectly soliciting on the other, may be more metaphysical than real.” (Alexander & Alexander, Inc. v. Danahy, 1986).

There is not a lot of law to help sort out these issues. As Judge Hillman points out, “much of the case law on solicitation in Massachusetts deals with former employees soliciting customers from their former employers,” not soliciting other employees.  However, he noted that “colleagues can generally be expected to have even closer personal relationships than do employees and customers; and wherever closer working relationships are, courts must bear in the mind the fact that solicitation can be quite subtle.”

Needless to say, the parties in the case took opposing views. AMD argued for something close to a “wink test”– if Feldstein says he is leaving AMD to work at Nvidia and winks at another employee he has solicited. The former employees in the case argued that AMD should be required to prove that they took “active steps to persuade” an employee to leave, and even then they were not soliciting if the person were planning to leave anyway.

Rejecting these extreme positions Judge Hillman formulated the following tests:

I will define solicitation as follows. Direct solicitation is what might be seen as traditional solicitation, encompassing any active verbal or written  encouragement to leave AMD, even if not intended to harm AMD. Due to the personal relationships that develop between colleagues, liability for indirect solicitation requires a more context-sensitive inquiry. …subtle hints and encouragements … can constitute indirect solicitation. However, to preserve the public’s interest in free personal communications, such solicitation should only be found where the finder-of-fact is satisfied that the solicitor actually intended to induce the solicitee to leave AMD.

Given the paucity of precedent on indirect solicitation in Massachusetts, this decision may be the best guide to the law of employee solicitation in Massachusetts at present.* However, the definition of “indirect solicitation” is problematic: given that a former  employee accused of indirect solicitation is unlikely to admit illegal intent, it may be very difficult for the former employer to prove the requisite level of intent in court.  Absent overt encouragement in the form of testimony or “smoking gun” emails,  what chance does the employer have of proving the “actual intent” required by this test? Under this definition “nudge, nudge, wink, wink” may be safe for the former employee.

*A caveat: this decision was issued by a federal court, not a state court. The decision may carry relatively little weight with a state court judge, who is not bound by federal court decisions on Massachusetts law. The state courts are the final arbiters of state law.

An obvious conclusion to be drawn from this case is that non-solicitation clauses (at least as applied to employees), are weak tea. A potentially more effective way of preventing an ex-employee from luring employees away to a competitor (in most states, but not all) is indirectly, through a non-compete agreement. Although non-competes have their own set of enforcement problems (see, for example, this recent post), they have fewer problems than non-solicitations.

I’ll be writing about the second important issue to emerge out of this case in a separate post.

AMD v. Feldstein (D. Mass. May 15, 2013)