If your employee parts ways with your company, you are entitled to your property back. Your property could include a work cellphone, laptop, notebooks, presentations, customer lists, drawings, and other documents. All of those are valuable, and your former employee cannot keep them or use them for their own personal gain.

For example, you may have owned a lawn-care business. You may have provided a former employee with a cellphone and laptop and access to customer lists, work orders, and landscaping designs and plans. These lists might diagram how Mrs. Smith likes her garden planted every spring, or how to properly care for Mr. Rodriguez’s prize rose bushes while he is away. The time and money you spent servicing those customers and recording their preferences, idiosyncrasies, and billing and contact information is a valuable resource. With it, your former employee could take advantage of your hard work and underbid you because they don’t have the overhead and historic costs that you have. You need that information back.

But this doesn’t only happen to landscaping companies—the lifeblood of any business is the relationships built up over time with suppliers, customers, and colleagues. If a former employee is unfairly taking advantage of relationships you built and paid for, call the Vargo Law Firm to speak to one of our experienced attorneys. The Vargo Law Firm understands and has prosecuted cases involving the Texas Uniform Trade Secret Act and other common laws to prevent unfair competition by former employees and competitors. We have obtained temporary restraining orders and temporary injunctions against former employees and new employers that required the return of computer, restrained the use of pricing/client lists, and brought the opposing parties to the table for prompt and meaningful financial resolutions. In a nutshell, we know how to stop your former employee from competing unfairly against you, and we know how to achieve that result quickly and cost-efficiently as possible.