In a ruling on May 27, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit arguably lowered the threshold for tortious interference claims. A trucking company offered better compensation terms to a competitor’s employees, but did not specifically target those employees or otherwise take any specific action to cause those employees to leave the competitor. Even so, the court held, this evidence established a fact question as to whether the more attractive job offers caused the employees to breach their noncompete contracts.
There’s a decent chance that if an employee is being sued for breaching a noncompetition agreement, a lawsuit against the new employer for tortious interference isn’t far behind. In CRST Expedited v. TransAm Trucking, 960 F.3d 499, 502 (8th Cir. 2020), the court may have made it an even safer bet.
