James Mcglothen Case Summary

Case 1 James McGlothen versus Heritage Environmental Service LLC, 705 2d 1069 (1999)
James McGlothen worked as a project manager and interior division manager for Heritage Environmental Service, LLC from 1992 to 1998. In 1998, he was assigned to a sales job. However since he did not like the assignment, he decided to resign and work for the company’s competitor. While there, he began to solicit Heritage’s customers and even enticed one of the employees to join him in his new organization. When Heritage learned about McGlothen’s activities, Heritage filed a case to enforce the terms of a covenant not to compete for one year since James retained confidential information and was contacting both customers and employees of Heritage. McGlothen appealed since this was unreasonably detrimental to him since he was made employed for that period. Upon McGlothen’s employement with Heritage, he signed an agreement stipulating provisions not to compete. But Heritage was able to produce evidence that McGlothen has in his custody sensitive documents which were stamped “confidential”.
The court ruled that McGlothen breached the contract since he had proven to divulge confidential information and had showed detrimental to the goodwill of Heritage. The trial court determined that the information that McGlothen took was confidential
However, one of them did not sign the contract. Over the course of their employment with Grace Hunt LLC, a purchase of the company was made to its successor Grace Hunt. The three employees became dissatisfied with their employment under Grace Hunt. The first two decided to resign and move to SIS Software LLC. The other employee followed suit. Finding out that they were connected with a new company, their old clients at Grace Hunt followed. Grace Hunt filed a case of violation of employment contract and business interference for