The employee was employed as a sales representative and signed an individual employment agreement that included a confidentiality undertaking requiring him to protect the employer’s confidential information and trade secrets.
After leaving his employment, the employee joined a competing company and began approaching customers whom he had serviced while working for his former employer. The former employer applied to the Labor Court for an injunction prohibiting the employee from contacting those customers.
The Labor Court held that a distinction must be drawn between a list of customer names, which can generally be obtained from publicly available sources, and a database containing customer business profiles that includes additional non-public commercial information.
Such a business profile may constitute a trade secret where it provides its owner with a commercial advantage and is not publicly available. Accordingly, the former employee’s use of such information may amount to the unlawful misappropriation of a trade secret.
The court therefore issued a temporary injunction prohibiting the former employee from contacting the former employer’s customers for a specified period of time.
