Non-Compete Agreements and Intellectual Property

Case Study 3
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Case Study 3: Non-compete Agreements and Intellectual Property
A non-compete agreement is a legally binding agreement between an organization and an employee specifying a particular time within which an employee should not work for a rival company or start a similar venture. At times, employees violate these agreements for one reason or the other. A similar situation occurred in Brazil in 1997, where Bain, a management consultancy firm, poached almost all employees of a rival company known as Value Partners (Tarique et al., 2022). Consequently, Value Partners filed criminal charges against Bain, alleging a breach of trust and loyalty of its former employees. Value Partners was constrained to file the case in Boston, where Bain’s headquarters were domiciled. This is because Brazil’s law did not offer significant compensatory and punitive damages for employees who exhibited disloyalty or stole intellectual property. Implementing non-compete agreements continues to pose myriad challenges to employers due to disparate rules and cultures of different countries.
In Brazil, the right-...