The Supreme Court of Illinois Is Not Interested in the Non-Compete Consideration Rule

For the third time, the Supreme Court of Illinois has declined to hear a petition for leave to appeal that confronts the question of continued employment as consideration for a non-compete agreement.

For at least the past few years, practitioners have operated under the assumption, perhaps wrongly, that Illinois courts established a bright-line two-year rule under which continued employment may serve as consideration for an employee restrictive covenant agreement. This is the so-called Fifield rule, stemming from a 2013 First District Appellate Court case that appeared to set forth a bright line. The Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal in Fifield, so the lack of interest in follow-on cases is not surprising.

This past week, the Court declined a petition for leave to appeal in the case of Automated Industrial Machinery, Inc. v. Christofilis, 2017 IL App (2d) 160301-U. This was my case, and I represented Tom Christofilis at trial and on appeal. Early on in the litigation, the circuit court had granted our motion to dismiss a breach of contract claim given that Christofilis' former employer, AIM, had required him to sign an afterthought non-compete that lasted only for 5 months before he resigned. The court noted that it was not relying at all on Fifield, rightly stating that not a single case in Illinois endorsed consideration of just 5 months' continued employment.

Illinois' consideration rule has come under criticism from some, who apparently are dissatisfied that courts have tread a middle ground between the absolutist positions. Those positions state either that continued employment is not valid contract consideration for a non-compete, or that it is. Very few states require some sort of meaningful period of employment, and Illinois' "substantial period of time" rule is perhaps the most well-developed line of cases that forges a pragmatic path.

Though I say the cases are well-developed, they could certainly be clearer. I think Fifield is misunderstood because sometimes easy cases make for bad law. In retrospect, the two-year pronouncement was both unnecessary to the case's disposition and simply a product of loose opinion writing. I hate to say that and don't mean to indict the appellate court, but it's simply true.

In the bigger picture, the notion of continued employment as adequate consideration at all for a restraint of trade is just weird. It is ephemeral and in many cases illusory. It fails to account for the adhesive nature of the arrangement and the fact that the employee receives nothing at all comparable to what he or she is giving up. As lawyers, we're stuck with this silly, non-sensical paradigm of analyzing contract consideration that makes very little sense to clients and seems directly at odds with the disfavored nature of non-competes in the first instance.

Legislating this issue will prove difficult. But there's another way. If a court ever took a fresh look (and based on Fifield and Christofilis, I don't see that as imminent), it may want to ask just why continued employment is a permissible form of consideration in the first instance. Or how it comports with the adequacy rule that requires some decent fit between the restraint and the benefit conferred on the party restrained. Inertia is not often a good reason for justifying a legal rule, even if lawyers and judges assume that it is.