An Empirical Study On The Validity Determination Of Enterprise Non-competition Agreement

With the continuous development of society,enterprises have become one of the important forces to support the national economy,which play a very important role in promoting employment,protecting people’s livelihood and enhancing the level of national economic development throughout the domestic and abroad.In this era of knowledge-driven economy,more and more enterprises are enhancing their competitiveness by developing technological innovations and core technologies.But this kind of competitiveness must be based on sufficient R&D talents,while ensuring that the technological achievements and trade secrets are not disclosed at the same time.Therefore,in order to maintain these competitive advantages,most enterprises choose to sign non-competition agreement with employees to deal with the huge challenge of talent management and trade secrets management.Then,the issue on the validity determination of the non-competition agreement has become the focus of enterprises.However,the relevant legislation with some loopholes is too principle on the validity of the non-competition agreement,and in judicial practice,the different standards adopted by the court lead to the phenomenon of "different judgments for similar cases" on the determination of the validity.This phenomenon not only brings unpredictable legal risks to enterprises,but also hurts the market environment of free competition.From the perspective of protecting the interests of enterprises,this paper has clarified the differences between non-competition,prohibition of business and limited competition,cleared the meaning of non-competition and has be based on the started point.Combining with theory and practice,this paper has collated the concept,characteristics,basic theory and judgment elements of the effectiveness of non-competition agreement.After that,this paper has used the empirical research method and randomly selected 199 cases,and has found that the dispute focus of the effectiveness of the non-competition agreement mainly focuses on seven elements of adjudication: subject of obligation,object of protection,economic compensation,limitation period,limitation scope,limitation region and liquidated damages.However,the problems of "different judgments in similar cases" have been concentrated on the first three basic elements,then,the following article has made a targeted empirical analysis to them.By analyzing the cause of the "different judgments in similar cases",has found out that crucial reasons of issues lie in the loopholes in the relevant law:legal provisions is not clear、the standard of judicial application is not uniform,and the enterprises have not controlled the legal risks.Finally,there are solutions to the problems: improve the relevant legislation,appropriately expand the scope of application of the obligation and the object,while clarify the form of terminate right of non-competition agreement which should not be expanded when no economic compensation is paid;unify the standards of judicial judgment,creating a fair and just judicial environment in the court stage for the application of law;enterprises should strengthen contract legal risk management to effectively control and prevent the legal risks from the validity determination of the non-competition agreement.