Your employer may bring a workplace injunction order to prevent you and your new employer from:

• contacting your former employer’s customers, clients, and employees

• using your former employer’s confidential business information
• competing with your former employer (e.g., making a bid for the same project)
• making defamatory comments about your former employer, or their products, quality of service, etc.

To obtain an injunction, your former employer must show that you had some obligation towards them which you are violating. Your obligation is usually articulated as a clause in your employment contract. In limited situations, your employer may be able to obtain an injunction on the basis that you were a “fiduciary”, which is a type of employee who owes duties of confidentiality and loyalty to their former employer even without an employment agreement.

Because it is such a serious remedy, obtaining an injunction is not easy. Your employer must convince the court that not granting an injunction will cause irreparable harm to their business, among other difficult thresholds.