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“Education, too?”: tips for investigating sexual allegations in schools and higher education settings
Alfie Cranmer
The decision in Towry EJ Limited v Barry Bennett and others has caused a lot of comment in the IFA community, largely because of the way Towry, and Andrew Fisher its chief executive, divides opinion amongst them. However, the real issue is what the case tells us about the ability of employers to protect their business from departing employees.
Briefly, Towry and Edward Jones both operated in the financial services field. In November 2009, Towry bought Edward Jones. Seven employees left Towry to join Raymond James. They had restrictions prohibiting them from soliciting clients. Although Towry had no evidence that the employees had solicited clients, when they were followed by a large number of their clients Towry sued them, arguing that the number of clients following them proved that they had been soliciting in breach of contract. The High Court (Mrs Justice Cox) refused to draw this inference and Towry’s claim failed. The court suggested that Towry underestimated the level of loyalty clients had to their financial advisers.
It is tempting to dismiss this as yet another case showing how hard it is to enforce restrictions, but three points come out of it:
The outcome would have been different if there had been a restriction on dealing with clients; there would then have been no need to prove solicitation, only that that the ex-employees dealt with the clients.
A case can in principle be based entirely on inference, it was just that here the evidence was not strong enough to persuade the court.
Having described as “shrewd” the observation in Paul Goulding QC’s textbook Employee Competition that “[t]he concept of solicitation is not easy to define”, Mrs Justice Cox goes on to conclude that it involves a direct or indirect request, persuasion or encouragement to clients to transfer their business. As lawyers can debate endlessly what is and is not solicitation, this observation, whilst helpful, does not end the debate. If It does not, for example, produce any clear answer to the question whether a Christmas card is solicitation (I fear the answer will still be that it all depends).
In fact, the courts seem increasingly willing to protect a business against former employees, provided the employer has followed a few simple rules:
If this all sounds too complicated and legalistic, you could always do what some of the banks do: defer bonuses or other compensation over several years and ensure you have the right not to pay it out if the employee misbehaves before payment is finally made, even if the employee has moved on to new employment in the meantime. Except, of course, those compensation schemes can be really complicated.
We welcome views and opinions about the issues raised in this blog. Should you require specific advice in relation to personal circumstances, please use the form on the contact page.
Alfie Cranmer
Melinka Berridge
Sameena Munir
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