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Comment by tgsovlerkhgsel

6 days ago

OTOH, beware letting yourself be intimidated by scary looking but unenforcable clauses that are all over contracts. In doubt, spend a bit of money on a lawyer to figure out what your real situation is.

I know of several cases where lawyers said "don't bother arguing with them about clause X, just sign it and ignore it".

I suspect our primary school upbringing of “follow the rules” holds a lot of people back.

Seems like a lot of successful people in business know exactly how far they can step over the line without suffering serious consequences.

This is pretty much the advice every lawyer has given me in the past. The likelihood of it coming up is very low. Sometimes it's good to not be special.

  • The one time I had to sign a non-compete--because my company was acquired--I just signed it because it was quite specific and I wasn't going to be an exec of a storage company anytime soon. Probably didn't matter much because I left a few months later anyway.

What are the keywords for finding a lawyer who can advise on non-competes?

Asking because it turned out nearly impossible to find a local lawyer to advise on a dispute couple months ago - with 9 out of 10 telling me they only do divorces or real estate or immigration. I was literally calling one by one from a list based on what I believe were relevant search criteria on State Bar website.

I had a non-compete cause in a contract, I wound up in a dispute over unemployment insurance and the contract came up, the judge told me that the non-complete cause didn't make any sense at all but that's because it was poorly written.