For the past 10+ years, Florida attorney Jonathan Pollard and his colleagues have made a name for themselves primarily as defense lawyers. Since its inception, the Firm has defended nearly 200 non-compete or trade secret cases. Over the years, the Firm has defeated a number of preliminary and permanent injunction motions in high stakes cases, sometimes with millions of dollars at stake. The Firm also has prevailed on multiple appeals in the Florida District Courts of Appeal and the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. Although the Firm continues to accept a limited number of non-compete and trade secret cases, Pollard’s focus has shifted to plaintiff-side employment cases. Jonathan Pollard has issued the following statement:
—-
Over the past decade, we have litigated lots of non-compete cases. We’ve won way more than we’ve lost. We basically wrote the playbook on how to aggressively defend non-compete cases in a pro-non-compete state like Florida. But at a certain point, it gets old. Florida has a problem with non-compete abuse. And, unfortunately, courts in Florida have repeatedly misapplied this area of law for decades. I dedicated ten years of my career to fighting this fight while beating the drum for state and national-level reform. I created a lot of good case law. And I helped start righting the ship. I’m am incredibly proud of our track record in this space. But no amount of litigation is going to solve the problem of non-compete abuse. Especially not in a state like Florida, where non-compete abuse and misuse has become a normal part of business. The only silver bullet here will be federal law banning all or nearly all employee non-compete agreements. That’s the only way you stop bad corporate actors from abusing non-compete agreements.
As for me, I am done litigating 20 or 30 non-compete cases at one time, primarily to prove a point and change the law. I think I’ve made my point pretty clear. I mean, I was just in the Wall Street Journal – again – the other week talking about non-compete abuse in response to the FTC’s latest proposal, which I fully support. So now I am focusing on plaintiff-side employment cases. Equal pay. Discrimination. Sexual harassment. Retaliation. Workplace violence. When you’ve managed to win non-compete cases in a place like Florida, that’s like winning a fight with two hands tied behind your back. And we’ve done it for years. We’ve turned cases that started as a defensive case…. as a non-compete case against one of our clients … into offensive cases that settled for our client being paid substantial dollar amounts. And that’s great. We have gotten fantastic results for many of our clients over the years. But I have always thought to myself, “What could we do if we didn’t have this non-compete nonsense that we always had to overcome in the vast majority of our cases? If we weren’t starting with a deck mostly stacked against us? What could we do if we were the plaintiff? If we selected the cases we pursued? If we built the cases from the ground up? Because, remember, in defending all these non-compete and trade secret cases, we’re basically a crisis response team. We take the patient (the client) in whatever condition we find them. We take cases that start off looking like a disaster about to happen and salvage them. We’re doing clean-up work. What could we do if we carefully selected cases to pursue, as the plaintiffs, and then just went full throttle on offensive with nothing to defend against (i.e. no threat of preliminary injunction, no threat of a client losing their business, etc.)? That’s what we’re about to find out.
—-
Going forward, the Firm will continue to defend a select number of non-compete and/or trade secret cases. These cases will mostly fall at the opposite ends of the spectrum: Either high-stakes, bet-the-company non-compete cases where many millions of dollars are at issue. Or, non-compete cases against working class people, cases in which Pollard remains committed to defending poor and working people against non-compete abuse without charging them a single dollar. Otherwise, the Firm will allocate the vast majority of its time to representing employees in various plaintiff-side employment disputes. This is not new territory for the Firm. Pollard has handled employment discrimination, retaliation, and workplace sexual harassment or sexual assault cases for years. But the Firm has never focused on them until now. Pollard and his colleagues began this transition back in July and, so far, the results have been outstanding.
Pollard PLLC is a law firm based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida that represents employees in a variety of employment cases. The Firm’s founder Jonathan Pollard has appeared in or on The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, PBS News Hour, NPR, The Guardian, The Times (London), and more. He has 75,000+ followers on LinkedIn where he frequently posts his commentary on law, business, and life. The Firm can be reached at 954-332-2380.
