Tampa Non-Compete Lawyer

Cory Cannon handles Florida non-compete and non-solicitation disputes from both sides of the table: the Tampa Bay business trying to enforce a restrictive covenant against a departing employee, and the worker who just received a cease-and-desist letter and a threat of an injunction. In Florida these fights are governed by one core statute, section 542.335, Florida Statutes (the state’s restrictive-covenant law), and, for agreements signed on or after July 1, 2025, by a second one, the new Florida CHOICE Act. A non-compete is enforceable here only if the party seeking to enforce it proves a legitimate business interest behind the restriction and proves that the restriction is reasonable in time, geographic area, and line of business. No federal rule rescues either side: the Federal Trade Commission’s 2024 ban on most non-competes never took effect, so Florida law controls.

One boundary defines this page. A restrictive covenant is a promise written into a contract (most often a non-compete, a non-solicitation clause, or a confidentiality clause), and this page is about enforcing or defending that promise between the people who actually signed it. If your real problem is a competitor who lured your employee away or induced a customer to break a contract, the claim runs against the outsider who did the luring, and that is tortious interference, not covenant enforcement. If the departure also broke a partnership or operating agreement, owner-level covenants are covered on our partnership dispute page. And because a non-compete is at bottom a contract, the general rules on our breach of contract page apply here too. This page is part of our broader business litigation practice.

What a restrictive covenant actually restricts

People say “non-compete” to mean any post-employment restriction, but three distinct clauses do different jobs, and Florida courts treat them differently because each protects a different interest.

• Non-compete. A promise not to work for, or start, a competing business, usually limited to a defined line of work, a geographic area, and a period of time. This is the broadest restraint and the hardest to justify, because it can keep someone from earning a living in their field.
• Non-solicitation. A narrower promise not to solicit the employer’s customers, or its employees, after leaving. It does not bar the person from competing at all, only from taking the specific relationships the employer built. Because it is narrower, it is often easier to enforce than a full non-compete.
• Non-disclosure or confidentiality. A promise not to use or reveal the employer’s confidential information: pricing, bid strategy, customer lists, methods. This overlaps with Florida’s Uniform Trade Secrets Act (chapter 688), which can supply its own claim when the information qualifies as a trade secret, even without a signed agreement.

Most departures involve more than one of these at once. A resigning estimator who leaves with the customer list and the bid templates may have breached a non-solicitation clause, a confidentiality clause, and a non-compete simultaneously, and the employer’s leverage depends on which clauses were actually signed and how each one is worded. The first task in every case, on either side, is to read the agreement clause by clause and separate what was promised from what everyone assumed.

Is my non-compete enforceable in Florida?

This is the question we hear most, from both employers and employees, and the honest answer is the same either way: it depends on two things the enforcing party has to prove. Section 542.335 sets a two-part test, and the burden sits on the business trying to enforce.

First, a legitimate business interest. The covenant has to protect one of the interests the statute recognizes. Section 542.335(1)(b) lists them:

• Trade secrets;
• Valuable confidential business or professional information that is not quite a trade secret;
• Substantial relationships with specific existing or prospective customers, patients, or clients;
• Customer goodwill tied to a trade name, a geographic location, or a marketing area;
• Extraordinary or specialized training the employer provided.

A restriction that protects none of these (one designed simply to keep a former worker from competing) is, in the statute’s words, unlawful, void, and unenforceable. “We don’t want the competition” is not a legitimate interest. “This person holds our confidential pricing and the relationships with the accounts they managed” usually is.

Second, reasonableness. Even with a legitimate interest, the restraint has to be reasonably necessary to protect it: no broader in time, area, or scope of activity than the interest requires. The statute builds in duration presumptions that frame the fight:

Three features of the statute surprise people, and they cut in the employer’s favor. Section 542.335(1)(c) directs a court to modify an overbroad covenant rather than discard it, so a two-county restriction stretched to the whole state is likely to be narrowed to what is reasonable, not struck down. Section 542.335(1)(g) tells courts they may not consider the individual hardship the restriction causes the employee: the “I need this job to feed my family” argument, decisive elsewhere, carries no weight here. And the statute directs courts to construe the covenant in favor of protecting the legitimate interest, without the usual rule that ambiguities are read against the party who drafted it. Florida is, by design, one of the more enforcement-friendly states in the country. The one hard limit that protects workers is the front-end requirement: the covenant must be set out in a writing signed by the person against whom it is enforced. No signature, no non-compete under this statute.

The 2025 change every Florida business should know: the CHOICE Act

On July 1, 2025 the Florida CHOICE Act took effect, codified at sections 542.41-542.45, Florida Statutes. It does not replace § 542.335. That statute still governs most agreements. Instead it creates a second, stronger track that employers may use for high-earning employees and contractors, and it materially changes the leverage when it applies.

The CHOICE Act reaches only a covered employee: someone whose base salary is more than twice the annual mean wage of the Florida county where the employer’s principal place of business sits (or where the employee lives, if the employer is out of state). Licensed health care practitioners are excluded. For everyone below that pay line (most hourly and rank-and-file workers), the older § 542.335 rules still control. Where the CHOICE Act does apply, three things change:

• Duration. Covered non-compete and “garden leave” agreements can run up to four years, twice the two-year outer edge that § 542.335 presumes unreasonable.
• Garden leave. The act blesses arrangements where the employer keeps paying the employee’s salary through a long notice period while the employee stays off the market. The employee remains on the payroll but out of the competitive field.
• A mandatory injunction. On the employer’s application, a court must preliminarily enjoin a covered employee from the prohibited work. The burden then flips to the employee, who can dissolve the injunction only by proving, by clear and convincing evidence, that they will not perform similar services or use confidential information, that the new employer is not actually a competitor, or that the former employer failed to pay what the agreement promised.

The trade-off for that power is procedure. A covered non-compete has to give the employee written notice of the right to consult a lawyer before signing and at least seven days to review it, and the employee has to acknowledge in writing that the job involves confidential information or customer relationships. Miss those steps and the agreement falls back to ordinary § 542.335 analysis. The CHOICE Act applies only to agreements entered on or after July 1, 2025. Every covenant signed before that date (and every covenant with an employee under the salary threshold) is still judged under § 542.335. If you are drafting new agreements, or you were asked to sign one recently, this is the first thing to check.

What about the FTC’s national non-compete ban?

In 2024 the Federal Trade Commission issued a rule that would have banned most non-competes across the country and voided existing ones for the vast majority of workers, with a start date of September 4, 2024. It generated a great deal of coverage, and a lasting misunderstanding: many people believe their non-compete is already void because of it. It is not. A federal court in Texas set the rule aside before it ever took effect, holding that the FTC lacked the authority to issue it. The rule never became enforceable, the FTC dropped its appeals in 2025, and the agency has moved to remove the rule from the books. For a Florida non-compete today, the federal rule is a dead letter: your agreement rises or falls on § 542.335 and, where it applies, the CHOICE Act. Do not assume a covenant is unenforceable because of a federal ban you read about; assume it is governed by Florida law until a lawyer tells you otherwise.

If you are the business enforcing a covenant

An employer’s leverage is highest in the first days after a departure and decays fast. The sequence we work through:

• Pin down what was signed. Produce the executed agreement and any handbook acknowledgments. Without a signed covenant, the § 542.335 claim is gone before it starts, though a trade-secret or non-disclosure theory may survive.
• Identify the legitimate interest, concretely. Not “competition,” but the specific asset at risk: the confidential bid pricing this person built, the accounts they managed, the training you paid for.
• Preserve the proof of the breach. Is the new employer a genuine competitor, and what did the employee take on the way out: the customer list, the lead pipeline, the estimating templates? Forensics often matter more than the contract language.
• Send a targeted cease-and-desist that identifies the covenant, the conduct, and the relief sought. A careful letter frequently resolves the matter; a sloppy one invites a declaratory-judgment suit against you.
• Move for a temporary injunction if the harm is real and ongoing. Under § 542.335, violation of an enforceable covenant creates a presumption of irreparable injury, a meaningful advantage, though you still must show a clear legal right and no adequate remedy at law. Under the CHOICE Act, the preliminary injunction is mandatory for a covered employee.

A caution: enforcement is a business decision as much as a legal one, and litigation is public and expensive. We tell you which of your agreements will hold and which a court will trim on the first motion.

If you got a cease-and-desist or were sued

If a former employer has sent a demand letter, threatened an injunction, or filed suit, the worst move is to ignore it and the second-worst is to keep doing whatever prompted it while you wait. Florida’s presumption of irreparable harm means an injunction can move fast. But enforcement-friendly does not mean automatic, and real defenses exist. The ones that decide these cases:

• No legitimate business interest. If the covenant protects nothing the statute recognizes (it is a bare restraint on competition), it is void. General skills and general industry knowledge you brought with you or developed on the job are not a protectable interest.
• Overbreadth, but manage your expectations. A covenant that is too long, too wide, or bars work far beyond the employer’s actual business is vulnerable. Remember, though, that the court’s remedy is usually to modify it, not erase it. Overbreadth is a tool to shrink the restriction to something you can live with, not a certain way out of it.
• No signature, or the wrong document. The statute requires a covenant signed by you. Employers sometimes cannot produce a signed agreement, or try to enforce a policy you never signed.
• The employer breached first. A party who materially broke the contract (failed to pay earned commissions or severance, for example) may forfeit the right to enforce the covenant against you. Under the CHOICE Act specifically, an employer’s failure to provide the promised salary or benefits is one of the paths out of the injunction.
• You are not actually competing. If your new role is outside the covenant’s defined scope, or your new employer is not a genuine competitor, the restriction may not reach what you are doing at all.

What not to rely on: your personal hardship. The instinct is to explain that you need the job and the restriction is unfair to your family. That argument is off the table: § 542.335(1)(g) bars the court from considering it. The winning defense is almost always about the covenant and the employer’s interest, not about you. Bring us the agreement, the demand letter, your offer from the new employer, and a clear account of what you did and did not take. We will tell you where you actually stand before you make a move that hardens the case against you.

When an employee takes clients to a competitor

The most common trigger for these disputes is a non-solicitation problem: an employee leaves and the accounts start following. A salesperson resigns and the customers they managed move their business within weeks. An estimator jumps to a direct competitor and the same lead list starts getting the same bids. Whether that is actionable turns on the exact wording of the non-solicitation clause (does it bar soliciting all customers, or only those the employee served? does it cover customers who reach out on their own, or only those the employee approaches?) and on what the evidence shows the departing employee actually did.

Two roads can run from the same facts, and it matters which one you are on. The claim against the former employee for breaking their own non-solicitation or confidentiality promise lives on this page. The claim against the new employer or competitor (for knowingly inducing the breach, or for interfering with the customer relationships themselves) is a different cause of action with different elements, covered on our tortious interference page. Strong cases often pursue both at once: the covenant claim against the person who signed it, and the interference claim against the outsider who profited from the breach. And where the departing employee carried off genuinely confidential information, a trade-secret claim under chapter 688 can run alongside both, sometimes without any signed agreement at all. We sort out which claims the facts will actually support before anyone files.

Deadlines that control a Florida non-compete claim

Two clocks run in these cases, and they run at very different speeds.

The five-year limitation period is real but almost never the operative deadline. The one that decides outcomes has no number attached to it: the timing of the injunction. An employer who sits on a known breach for months weakens the argument that the harm is urgent and irreparable, and a covenant with a defined term keeps shrinking while everyone waits: a two-year restriction with fourteen months left is worth less than one enforced the week the employee walked. Whichever side you are on, the practical deadline is measured in days, not years. Deadlines also shift with facts and with legislative amendments; confirm yours with a lawyer rather than a webpage, including this one.

What it costs, and who pays the attorney fees

Non-compete work is ordinarily billed hourly, because the driver is speed (getting to, or defeating, an injunction) rather than a long slow damages case. For employers, the early phase (investigation, cease-and-desist, and, where warranted, an injunction motion) is where most of the cost and most of the value sit. For employees, an early, candid assessment often prevents a far more expensive fight, or reframes the matter into a negotiated exit the former employer will accept.

Fees can shift. Section 542.335 allows a court to award attorney’s fees and costs to the prevailing party in an action to enforce or to challenge a restrictive covenant, and the statute treats contract terms that try to bar such an award as unenforceable, so the loser paying the winner’s fees is a live possibility in these cases regardless of what the agreement says. The CHOICE Act works the same way: in an action to enforce a covered agreement, the prevailing party (which can be the employee) is entitled to attorney’s fees and costs, and a prevailing employer may additionally recover monetary damages. That exposure cuts both ways and it changes the math: a weak enforcement action, or a weak defense, can cost more than the dispute itself. We factor fee exposure into the strategy from the first meeting, and we tell you plainly what a realistic range looks like before you commit to a fight. The initial consultation costs nothing.

How we work these cases

Cory Cannon was founded by a Florida attorney with a family history in construction for generations. Many of the businesses on both sides of these disputes (contractors, suppliers, and service firms) hold covenants that protect what actually moves a construction-adjacent business: the estimating data, the supplier pricing, the bid pipeline, and the crews. We read those covenants against how the work is really done, not against a template, and we take both sides: enforcing for the businesses that built the relationships, and defending workers against covenants that overreach.

Where we handle these disputes

We represent businesses and individuals in the circuit courts of Hillsborough, Pinellas, Manatee, and Sarasota counties (Tampa, St. Petersburg, Bradenton, Sarasota, Venice, and the communities between) and in arbitration where an employment or shareholder agreement requires it. Non-compete and non-solicitation disputes are frequently filed as emergency injunction matters, so the local circuit and the assigned division shape how fast the case moves; we handle that side of it so you can focus on the business.

Talk to us before positions harden

Non-compete disputes are won and lost in the first two weeks: in the letter that goes out, the evidence preserved, and the injunction filed or defeated. If you are an employer whose covenant is being ignored, or a worker facing a cease-and-desist, bring us the agreement, the correspondence, and a straight account of what happened. We will tell you whether the covenant is enforceable, what it is worth to press or to resist, and what the fight will cost. Contact us for a free consultation.