Good luck!
Mmmmm, let’s see.
A legal opinion on the enforceability of a contract that he hasn’t seen, and that, by your own admission, may or may not exist?
I thought we were trying to reduce the amount of uninformed speculation in this thread.
Personally, I prefer the bullshit, err, buckshot approach where all manner of advice is thrown out in hopes some of it applies. 
That’s true, in a sense. It’s not the employee’s LEGAL problem, most likely. But the employer may well decide that being sued is not worth the trouble, and drop the employee to avoid further litigation.
Which kinda WOULD be a problem for the employee, don’t you agree?
In addition to this consequence, I am not as sanguine as you are about the complete unenforeability of non-compete clauses. My firm - a federal contractor - uses them and we have successfully gotten injunctions against people going to work for competitors in Maryland and Virginia. Obviously, these are very fact-specific inquiries, but it should be a very clear sign that there is no one-size-fits-all answer here.
Which is why consulting an attorney licensed in your jurisdiction is the wisest thing to do.
Well, I’m happy you made the move and it looks like you’ll be happy in the new job.
I wish you well.
Well, since you specifically asked for my opinion on the legal aspect of the case, I can hardly be faulted for not addressing it. Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn’t; since we are operating solely on hypotheticals, it could go a variety of ways.
And now that we know that the OP is in New York, let us examine what an attorney licensed to practice in that state has to say about non-compete contracts:
Which makes NY substantially like CA in that respect. So it looks like the OP (had she been covered by a non-compete) would probably not be in any jeopardy in following my over-broad, un-licensed WAG advice.
FEAR ITSELF, we can continue this discussion in the Pit.
Your experience here should also have told you that how you stated your opinion was badly done and the kind of thing that gets threads locked.
Badly done? What does that mean? Poor grammar?
This isn’t making any sense.
Note that this statement, even if true, does not address the more likely issue that the OP’s former and current employer (1) might have had an anti-poaching agreement, and even if not (2) still have a relationship that the OP’s current employer consider more important than their desire to keep the OP in-house.
Furthermore, it seems to be unwise to me to base your advice to someone else on a matter that’s pretty important to him or her based on the conclusion of one person–somebody you know nothing about–on a matter of New York law that you found on the Internet.
You made a definitive, conclusory statement about the law without knowing any pertinent facts of the situation (and we still don’t know most of the operative facts and probably won’t, because we don’t have access to the required information), and gave someone definitive advice on a matter that is very important to him or her (employment) without recognizing any of the possible factual and legal complications.
I don’t know, perhaps to you, employing relevant disclaimers, acknowledgment of one’s (1) lack of expertise and (2) lack of information, and exploring significant alternative explanations is “pussy-assed” or something, but there’s a erason why most jurisdictions restrict who is allowed to give legal advice. If you do this kind of thing for your friends and family, believe me, you aren’t doing them any favors. Maybe it’s good enough for you if you get to feel like you’ve done something.
So are you proposing that the SDMB treat specific questions about the law the same as specific questions about medicine? Do you want them closed immediately, before there is a chance someone will be misled into signing something that will ruin their life? Is that where this is going?
If so, it is going to take a big bite out of the subject matter in GQ, IMHO and MPSIMS. I would like to get an administrator’s opinion on this.
FEAR ITSELF –
Much as you might like to make this a Board problem, it’s not; it’s a problem with you. As ASCENRAY so succinctly put it: “You made a definitive, conclusory statement about the law without knowing any pertinent facts of the situation (and we still don’t know most of the operative facts and probably won’t, because we don’t have access to the required information), and gave someone definitive advice on a matter that is very important to him or her (employment) without recognizing any of the possible factual and legal complications.”
You don’t need to have “overbroad, potentially wrong legal advice” banned before we can ask that someone who giving overbroad potentially wrong legal advice stop doing it once it’s been pointed out.
So there’s no need to ask for a ruling from the Board Gods. You don’t need to be toldthat you cannot do it, when the faint hope exists that you might recognize on your own that you should not do it.
Let’s examine your admonition:
So does this apply only to me? Or does it apply to everyone who might read a specific question regarding the law? "Cause if it does, you are advocating a de facto* ban on discussing any specific legal topics, because your preconditions can never be met on an internet messageboard. Or maybe these rules are just for* me.*
And I thought we were doing this in the Pit? I can’t use my potty mouth here.
*fancy legal term I pulled out of my ass.
It’s good advice for anyone. And as I said, it doesn’t have to be a rule before you’re allowed to take it. Seems pretty simple to me.
Or else you get pitted by the SDMB Bar Association.
Fear, although I agree with everything that Jodi, Gfactor, Bricker and the other lawyers have said about your posts in this thread, I don’t think anyone is advocating a ban on legal questions in GQ.
What we would like to cease is foolish responses to legal questions.
A good part of what I do as a lawyer is draft and enforce employment covenants. Non-competes are only one kind of employment covenant. The OP’s situation does not seem to involve a a non compete. So much of what you say is not only wrong (as a blanket statement about noncompetes), but irrelevant to the OP’s situation*.
Please stop. You don’t know what you’re talking about.
*If the OP signed a noncompete and if the new employer was a competitor of the first employer, there might be a non-compete issue. It does not appear that this is a competitor situation, however.
Nutty Bunny, if you’re working as an auditor, your management may be concerned with independence issues. As in, the appearance of “job offered was in exchange for looking the other way when you spotted accounting irregularities”. I am not an accountant, but I did work in a consulting branch of an accounting firm for a while some years ago, and there were a lot of very strict rules that the auditors had to follow, about nearly everything.
In my part of the business (computer services) this was never an issue - one of the last projects I was on for that firm, the client hired one of our colleagues and there were no questions or problems.
I don’t know for sure if this is what is concerning your management, but I’d investigate that angle. Check out www.aicpa.org to see if they have any guidance or other information.
First of all, the non-compete contract is a non-issue, as we are a CPA firm and they are a heating and airconditioning company.
Well, nothing has happened yet between the two companies. All I know so far about any communication is that the accountant who is a friend of the guy who offered me the job called him and there were no fireworks. In fact, he asked me how it went when I told them I was leaving. So, he had no idea there were any fireworks.
I see one of 2 things happening:
- The CPA firm (which doesn’t want to lose a big client) lets the issue drop
- The heating company, being threatened with…whatever, recinds the job offer because I’m not worth the hassle. Then,
a. I find new employment because I’m going to be disgruntled or,
b. They put their money where their mouths are and give me the money they said they were going to counter-offer, as well as the modified tax season hours.
I asked my new employer if he signed anything when he retained our services that said anything about not being able to offer a job to anyone at the firm and he said, “Not that I remember.” So, who knows.
Another interesting thing: the HR consultant at our firm that the heating company paid to find a bookkeeper just hired someone for the CPA firm from that pool of canditates. Not for my position, of course. They don’t work that quickly.
So, I’ll see if anything happens on Tuesday when everyone is back at work. I’m still worried something will happen to ruin this for me.
The CPA firm does their annual review and, in order to maintain our independence, we sat down with them to let them know that they had to sign off on everything I touched. I couldn’t even post a Verizon bill to Telephone Expense without someone noting that on the invoice.
One of the accountants joke with me before I left today and said, “I’d better not have to do any journal entries at the end of the year!”
They won’t. 
[Moderating hat on]
This sums up my position. And I am one of the Moderators of this Forum.
Medical questions and legal questions are about the worst things we have to deal with. And usually we’re pretty lenient. We tend to wig out when the questions are too specific, and/or when the answers are too specific.
And we definitely don’t cotton to lay-people(read=amateurs) coming in and giving specific advice. We appreciate lay-people coming in and giving cites to sites which give rather factual information. But making black and white statements, and then qualifying them with "I am not a “lawyer/doctor/plumber” is just weasel verbiage. And it won’t be tolerated.
[Moderating hat off]