Suing Former Employees
Entrepreneurs pursuing the American dream has no bearing on taking customer lists and/or trade secrets on the way out the door. Would be entrepreneurs who wish to build companies on the foundation of theft of the intellectual property of their former employers and either fundamentally ignorant of the law or just unethical.
Customer lists are not public domain. They are the property of the vendor to those customers. Pursuing the dream of owning a company should come from seeing an opportunity to provide better service or a higher quality or lower cost product or to bring some innovation to the marketplace. If a would be entrepreneur is either that ignorant and/or that unethical, they deserve all the grief they may get from a former employer. They are also unlikely to be successful in the long run.
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That is not to say that former employers don't try to squash legitimate startups with frivolous lawsuits. These are part of the risks of a start up which must be weighed and contingencies that must be planned for before making the investment of time and money to start a company.
Lanny Goodman is a strategic planning consultant and president of Management Technologies Inc.. Since 1980 he has helped entrepreneurs build highly vital and productive companies. Lanny has developed a unique process to create self-managing companies based on the emerging scientific principles of self-organizing systems. His company works in a very wide variety of industries in the services, manufacturing and not-profit for industries with clients ranging from $1.5m to over $1b in sales. Contact Lanny at www.lannygoodman.com
