It’s the modern business emergency: a key employee resigns, the download logs tell their story, and within weeks the clients start moving. What can be restrained — and how fast — depends on three overlapping bodies of law: confidence, covenant and springboard — and on evidence gathered in the first week, not the third month.
Three Protections, One Battleground
Confidential information is protected by law itself — client lists, pricing, pipelines and technical material taken on the way out can be restrained from use and ordered returned, covenant or no covenant. Restrictive covenants add contractual restraint — non-solicitation, non-dealing, non-compete — enforceable by injunction if enforceable at all: restraint-of-trade doctrine voids what isn’t reasonable, meaning tailored to a legitimate interest (customer connection, confidence, workforce stability — never mere freedom from competition) and no wider than necessary in time, territory and scope; narrow drafting wins cases that intimidating boilerplate loses. Springboard relief aims at the head start itself: the ex-employee restrained from exploiting the unfair advantage the taking created, for as long as it would unfairly last — the answer to “but it’s all public now.” What none of them reach: skill, general experience, memory of the trade, and clients freely following someone who did nothing unlawful. These cases are fought exactly on those lines — with IT forensics as the fuel: download logs, email trails and timing evidence, preserved properly in the first days.
The First Week, Both Chairs
For the employer: preserve the forensic evidence immediately and properly; quantify what went and where it reaches; send the strong letter fast — return, undertakings, preservation — because it sometimes ends matters and always strengthens the application; and take the injunction decision now, with the undertaking as to damages honestly sized, because delay is this remedy’s enemy: urgency claimed late answers hard questions. For the departing employee: the honest audit first — if material was taken, verifiable early return and deletion on advice defuses springboard claims and transforms optics; the covenant analysed for its real reach before positions harden; undertakings drafted carefully rather than granted in panic or refused in defiance; and nothing deleted quietly — forensics finds it, and destruction reads as guilt. This practice acts in both chairs — the letters it writes are informed by the letters it answers — and the wider employment terrain connects to the firm’s practice at redundancysolicitors.ie and the employment injunction page’s mirror image.
Downloads Discovered - or a Letter Received?
The first week decides these cases. One call maps the evidence moves, the covenant's real reach and the honest injunction decision - either chair.
Call 01 5827148