The 2019 legal landscape of employee mobility continues to evolve, at times drastically. Courts and legislatures are giving increased scrutiny to employers’ claims to protect the confidentiality of their trade secrets and attempts to enforce their employees’ restrictive covenants, including non-competition and non-solicitation agreements. It can be hard for employers to prevent their confidential information and client goodwill from following certain departing employees.
With greater knowledge of the latest legal theories, decisions, statutes, and other developments in this area, employers can better protect and defend their interests—even preemptively—including in the ways they draft their employee agreements, design their compensation structures, and consider whether and when to engage in litigation.
This issue of Take 5 aims to provide a few tools for deciphering and navigating this changing employee mobility landscape.
On Friday October 6, 2017, the Trump administration released two interim final rules expanding the exemptions allowed under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act’s (the “ACA’s”) contraceptive coverage mandate. Under the ACA, employer group health plans generally are required to cover contraceptives, sterilization, and related patient education and counseling, with exemptions provided for religious houses of worship. The exemption was expanded by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as a result of the Supreme Court’s decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby 34 S. Ct. 2751 (2014), which held health plans of closely held for-profit corporations are not required to cover contraceptives if doing so would contradict the owner’s religious beliefs under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.