"Solicit," in a Non-Solicit, May Not Mean First to Solicit

Clear?

Didn't think so.

Much ink has been spilled over the term "solicit," since it's obviously a flash-point in non-compete litigation. That is, not all non-competes are true non-competes. Some restrict customer, or employee, solicitation. This is especially true for salespersons, who often have more limited restrictive covenant agreements concerned only with client contact.

For 20 years, I've dealt with clients who come to me with some variation of this question: What if the customer calls me first?

In other words, is that a "solicitation" that violates a restrictive covenant?

(Short digression.

The first layer of analysis is to look at the contract itself. Many non-solicitation covenants actually are broader, despite their customer-centric focus. They may prohibit an ex-employee from working with or accepting business from a group of clients. If that's the case, then an employee who wants to work with former customers needs to shift her focus away from the breach question to either contract formation or reasonableness.

Now back to the main point of this post.)

The meaning of "solicit" is pretty fact-specific. If a client contacts the employee about a project or ongoing work, then the employee likely hasn't solicited anything and may be free to work with the client on competitive business. But what if the client's initial contact is preliminary, vague, and just a precursor to eventual work? What if the discussions, in other words, contemplate that something else will happen?

There are a fair number of cases that give some color to the type of conduct that qualifies as "solicitation." But I haven't seen one quite like Quality Transportation Services, Inc. v. Mark Thompson Trucking, Inc., 2017 IL App (3d) 160761, which effectively answers my rhetorical questions.

The court there found that the client's initial contact was not dispositive of the solicitation question, and that the court needed to evaluate other circumstances. In particular, the factual question concerned the "large gaps of time that followed [the client's] initial phone call." Since the restrained party--it was a corporation, not an employee--appears to have made "multiple and arguably separate contacts" with the client, the "solicitation" question was not clear-cut. The case is definitely worth a read for anyone who wants to deconstruct the meaning of solicitation and get a sense of how courts look at customer contact.

A copy of the opinion is available here.

So what to draw from this. Employees bound by a true non-solicitation covenant, and who claim they didn't initiate client contact, need to keep detailed records of text messages, e-mails, and phone calls received. Those also should describe the nature of the conversation and whether the contact was preliminary or concrete enough to protect further communications as incidental follow-ups, and not renewed efforts to win business.

Remember: when an employer has a non-solicitation covenant, it has no real means of assessing who called whom. These clauses are ripe for litigation because the movement of business itself will trigger a reasonable assumption that the employee made first contact, not the client. But that isn't always the case. Proving that, however, is often really, really hard.