Perhaps you missed the part about it being standard industry practice for the incumbent to be shortlisted, hence the joint decision between her and her boss.
Unfortunately, my girlfriend is head of department, with sole responsibility for commissioning agencies. So she couldn’t remove herself from the process without leaving her job. She has, however, set up an independent panel to assess responses and come to a collective decision at the final pitch.
I’m not sure that I see any problem. Did your employment contract say that you couldn’t date a client? Did hers?
You aren’t competing with them in terms of a client relationship and at this point, you are past the time line of the do not compete so that is no longer an issue at this point.
Are your former employers a really small company? FWIW, I think that if they had a cause of action to sue that they would have done so. You may want to consult an attorney to get some advice as to what you can and can’t say. Even though the non-compete is up, you may still have a duty to them and you don’t want to intentionally interfere with business relationships.
Your GF needs to talk to her boss. Your ex-company isn’t looking too good in this either. They went to the Senior Partners to whine about it. She should not take part in the awarding of this particular contract. No they are acting almost histrionically about this and have probably poisoned the well with the Partner of your GF’s firm.
I disagree with this. Your mileage will vary by state, but from what I’ve seen they can most definitely be held enforceable.
No, nothing in either of our contracts. And work relationships are very common place. Not a great idea, obviously, but still common (I also know that my former boss had an affair with a client a few years ago and she’s married with kids. I’m not).
Yes they’re a small company. FWIW my contract is enforceable but hard to prove - my contract states that I can’t solicit former clients for business within six months, but I can still work for former clients if they approach me. To prevent me from doing so would apparently be restriction of trade (this is UK law, BTW). Irrelevant in this case anyway, as I’m not pitching for my GF’s business. I’m also not going round the industry slagging them off - I know it’s not worth my while.
I fail to see why putting your former employer on the short list is a problem. It’s not granting the contract and by passing the decision along to another, it eliminates charges that she is biased against the firm. The bidding firm is not hurt by her decision, and it puts her actions above criticism:
“She’s biased against us.”
“But she recommended you be among the finalists and took no part in the final decision. How is that biased?”
That forces the other company to prove her bias (and they’d look pretty foolish trying to do so). If, however, she turned them down, then the charge of bias would be harder to refute, and would be more readily believed by others.
In any case, if the other company doesn’t want the work, her company is under no obligation to give it to them. The real response to their comment to her boss should be: “Sorry you feel that way. But that’s your decision.”
This is someone you’re hiring. If a job seeker came up and said, “I’m not going to the job interview because the deck is stacked against me,” would you try to get him to come? Or just hire someone else?
There’s also the option that they know they won’t get the contract, but want something to blame it on other than the fact they don’t measure up.
I don’t see how the relationship was improper. Many people consider these kinds of relationships unwise, in the sense that they can put you into awkward positions of the sort that the OP now finds himself in. But, I don’t see anything unethical about the relationship itself, unless the OP had agreed not to date clients.
The troubling part of the situation, to me, is that the girlfriend’s employer (or at least, the “big boss”) still doesn’t know what’s going on. While personal relationships may not normally be the boss’s business, they become his business if they’ve spilled over into the workplace, and here that’s happened. For instance, it sounds to me like the girlfriend put the OP’s old employer on the “short list” in order to avoid antagonizing them and thus, hopefully, avoid an ugly confrontation about her personal life. But, if that’s true, then the contracting process isn’t being run solely in her employer’s best interests any more (which is presumably what the employer intends).
I think the right thing to do is to tell the girlfriend’s employer about the past relationship and what’s going on with the OP’s former employer. Not only is this the right thing to do with respect to her employer, but it also removes the leverage that the OP’s former employer has (you can’t blackmail someone with information that’s no longer secret).
This seems to be the general advice - and in fact I’ve just spoken to my GF who has said the same thing - she’s going to tell her managing partner, which she’s going to find excrutiating, but he has known her many years and has always had a lot of respect for her work, so hopefully it’ll be ok.
BTW many of you are referring to me as a ‘him’. I’m actually female, just to add spice to the story 
I think you and your girlfriend need to realize that she is likely to lose her job over this. Possibly not, but any outcome short of that is more than you should expect. Your GF needs to go to her boss, now, and tell him/her that she cannot do the bid process for that company for “personal reasons”.
And she better get her story straight before she does it. Saying she bent the rules first and then that it was standard business practice might be true in the first place or in the second, but it sure makes it look like there is something going on.
This is why fucking your co-workers is a bad idea.
Regards,
Shodan
Are you guys reading the same fact scenario that I am? First of all, according to San Vito, GF told her direct boss about the situation already. She has been working with the direct boss in making sure that the decision was fair.
It sounds like she(GF) and her boss followed the usual procedures in conducting the bid.
Another difference is that San Vito and the GF aren’t coworkers and aren’t in a boss employee situation. San Vito quit her employer to avoid any potential conflicts of interest, namely that San Vito’s employers pressure San Vito to pressure the client to choose them.
zweisamkeit already covered this, but you really need to understand that while you think you may be objective about this, you are not:
(bolding added for emphasis)
You, yourself, stated that she bent the rules. Your old employer does not think that it is a level playing field – and they are right. She is biased against them, and whether that is their fault, or whether she is overcompensating the other direction does not excuse bending the rules because of things going on in her (and your) personal life. Your old employer is not getting fairly evaluated, and her current employer is not getting the best evaluation of the contract.
Yes, she may find confessing excruciating, but it is a damn sight better than the mess this would be heading toward, otherwise.
And, anecdote time: My brother is a lawyer who does contract law for a company that is now a supplier of my own company. And I am the person who approved them as a supplier, and was involved in the bid and contract process. When he got the contract for review, he had to recuse himself because of the appearance of collusion.
I had never known he did legal work for that company. He had never known we were approaching them to supply us. First time he learned of it was when he saw my company’s letterhead on the contract documents. Even though both of us immediately told everyone at both companies of the relationship, and even though he does not deal with contracts involving my company, we still do not discuss topics related to the business.
You eventually left your old company, so good on that. But your girlfriend has not come clean, has continued to be involved in something where she has an apparent conflict of interest, and has not been forthcoming about this conflict of interest. Big problems.
I think you have no basis for which to make such a statement.
You have no right to say that. The mere existence of a bias does not automatically mean that the employer isn’t being fairly evaluated, especially if there are set, objective criteria for doing so. On top of that, she has taken the matter to at least one higher-up in the organization already
In my opinion, you have been arguing from ignorance this entire thread, and have made several claims that don’t hold any water. I’d particularly like to know what legal action you think SanVito’s former company can take against their client.
Stop reading things into my posts that were not there.
It is not the bias that shows the evaluation isn’t fair – it is the OP’s statement that the girlfriend bent the rules on the evaluation. She is using the bending of the rules to excuse the bias, but it is the bending of the rules that is the problem.
Please point out which claims I have made that do not hold any water. And the legal action that can be taken is “breach of contract.” The OP’s former employer is the current contract-holder. There will be language in their contract as to how the contract will be re-bid and awarded. This is how contracts work, and this is why you do not “bend the rules”.
However, the OP has since clarified that statement:
- Such rule bending is standard for the incumbent.
- OP’s GF’s boss was a party to the decision to include the incumbent.
It’s not the impropriety that you’re making it out to be.
Excuse me? Please demonstrate how they violated their contract.
You’re making this a black and white issue when it is anything but. I should’ve stopped reading when you started using words like “inappropriate relationship”. You may think that it is inappropriate, but you aren’t the boss.
To say that the evaluation isn’t fair to the company b/c she did something in their favor is inane, and not even worth addressing.
No kidding. S/he’s been acting like a jacked-up bully with an axe to grind from the get-go, and it’s completely unnecessary.
I can only assume that the “don’t be a jerk” rule has been retired these days.
Now I understand. You’re replying to a different thread than the rest of us.
How have her decisions hurt the company that made the bid?
Evidently, yes.
I’m talking about Lightray, not the OP. You and I would appear to be in agreement.
Not necessarily. I would i be surprised if there were such language. It sounds like they are at the end of a contract period and the form is soliciting bids from someone so they can start negotiating a contract. If I was the larger company, I sure as hell wouldn’t put that kind of language in the contact since it really isn’t necessary for purposes of enforcing the existing contract. Besides, suppose the criteria that you are looking for changed over that period of time? It wouldn’t make sense to come up with them before you need to.
They aren’t going to make the pitch. If they don’t try, I don’t see how they can prove any sort of breach. Even if there were such language, presumably they would have to bid and make the pitch before they could claim breach.
One quibble I have with the OP is her choice of terminology. I usually think of an affair as something involving parties who are involved with someone else. What she has described sounds like dating. The part where she says bent the rules is odd as well since from her description of what has occurred isn’t bending the rules but rather a slight difference in procedure, where the incumbent is given a preference.
For those making the claim that this is an inappropriate relationship, can you please tell me why? More specifically with respect to what duties if any, the respective parties have breached.
That’s why I said “generally.” Not to hijack the thread or go too deeply into this – the business I was in with this person is a cutthroat industry. 2 or 3 major players and a bunch of little guys who break federal laws to keep their costs low enough to compete. In this industry, having a list of potential clients – and what they pay your competitor – is a major bonus. The non-competes talk about years not months. To put it in terms that make sense – when my employer realised that as a Sr VP in charge of the accounts for 6 different states, and having an eidetic memory that I had never signed a non-compete he offered me a pay raise that was almost double, as well as more vacation/comp time and a bonus check that was about 1/2 my annual salary to entice me to sign one.
We stole salespeople from other companies often enough to have been sued more than once – and we won every single one of the cases for the salesmen. Mileage varies by state, competency of the person writing the contract and competency of the lawyer fighting it, but generally speaking they’re a waste of time.