`gotta be quick with this. Due to be marched off premises. can they force me to sign a confidentiality agreement on leaving. my current contract has nowt in it about this – their problem.

cheers,

I think not, but are they offering you something to incentivise you to do so?

They can't force you to sign anything. Worst case, say you're not signing it until you've taken legal advice.

ah yes good point.

they have tried, but it aint happening – whole reason i'm going is to take business with me. Although thinking about it, how exactly are these things policed anyway?

Nothing that predicts future action is legally enforceable, especially once the incentive is removed. AFAIK that is, and I'm a librarian.

P.S if you are time poor try http://www.outlaw.com lots of useful stuff for barnyard lawyers there…

IIRC they'd have to offer you gardening leave for the period of time your not allowed to work for anyone else, i.e. they'd employ you and make sure you weren't contacting clients etc.

From Outlaw.com (p.s I am not giving you legal advice here)

Employees and confidential information
Employees automatically have duties to their employers to not knowingly misuse or wrongfully disclose their employer's confidential information. These obligations are also often expressly confirmed in their employment contracts. If these employees leave a business, the business is less well protected. The courts will generally only protect the more important trade secrets of a business and will be reluctant to restrict ex-employees from subsequently using less critical information. To increase the chances of being able to restrict use of confidential information by ex-employees, it is important that a business can show that, (a) the ex-employees knew that the information concerned was highly confidential; and (b) appropriate measures were taken to protect the information.

As pointed out above – confidentiality can be implied but they should really have taken steps by getting you to sign a confidentiality agreement. The other thing a judge would look at if this came to court would be any precedence with other former employees – if they haven't enforced confidenitality in the past then they will be on very weak ground.

If they are sensible about it they should get you to sign a compromise agreement (which could include some clauses on confidentiality)offering you some form of moentary recompense. Just sign a confidentiality agreement without getting some form of legal advice first – tell your eomployer that and get them to pay for it.

Be careful if they make you work your notice that you don't take anything that could be deemed to be confidential. If they are worried about it get them to spell out what they deem as confidential but don't sign anything.

So what happened?

kick scream bite and say a big f you to the idea, what they going to do sack you?

They are quite common but restrictive clauses should already be in your contract. (i.e. cant work for a competitor or a supplier/referrer etc within a certain time period or within distance)

This isnt legal advice but recently i was asked to sign a new contract out of the blue and the only difference was such a clause. I excercised my right to seek legal advice (28 days).the clause has to be reasonable (i.e. it cant state that you cant work in the industry for say 12 months as that is unreasonable given that you may only be qualified to work in such an industry)