The Legal 500

Israel’s National Labour Court recently issued a significant and groundbreaking ruling regarding employers’ monitoring of employees’ emails in the workplace. This ruling is applicable and important for all businesses with employees in Israel.  HFN’s Labour and Employment Law department, led by Orly Gerbi, summarised the issue as follows:

High tech companies who employ foreign workers in the U.S. face dramatically increased U.S. federal regulatory scrutiny since December 2010 regarding technology they disclose to foreign workers located both within the U.S. and abroad. This is likely to catch many companies by surprise, and warrants immediate attention given the sanctions described below.

An employee?s undertaking not to work for a competing company after termination of his or her employment is a common limitation in employment contracts of many employees in Israel. Due to increasing competition between companies, especially in the hi-tech industry, employers use various tactics to reduce the flow of employees and knowledge to competing companies. For many years, the trend in labor courts in Israel was to enforce non-compete clauses incorporated into employees? contracts so long as the restriction was reasonable in terms of the time limit, geographical area and the expertise of the employee. However, in recent years, the labor courts, in a number of dramatic decisions, reduced significantly the possibility of restricting employees from competing with former employers. Below are the main principles of the new trends, the problems resulting there from and practical recommendations to increase the chances of enforcing non compete clauses today.