Non-Compete Attorney in New York City

New York has no statute governing non-compete agreements. Whether the one you signed can be enforced comes down to a four-part reasonableness test the Court of Appeals set out in BDO Seidman v. Hirshberg, 93 N.Y.2d 382 (1999), and courts apply it far more narrowly than most employees expect. Many New York non-competes are unenforceable as written. Knowing which parts a court will strike, and which it will enforce, is the difference between walking into a new job and sitting out a year.

We review non-compete and non-solicitation covenants before clients sign them, negotiate their scope during hiring, advise departing employees on what they can safely do next, and draft enforceable restrictions for employers who need to protect client relationships and confidential information.

When a New York Non-Compete Is Enforceable

A restrictive covenant is enforceable in New York only if it satisfies every part of the BDO Seidman test. It must:

  • be no greater than necessary to protect a legitimate employer interest;
  • not impose undue hardship on the employee;
  • not injure the public; and
  • be reasonable in duration and geographic scope.

The first requirement does most of the work. New York recognises a narrow set of legitimate interests: protecting trade secrets and genuinely confidential information, preventing an employee whose services are unique or extraordinary from competing, and protecting client relationships the employer paid to develop. An employer's general wish to avoid competition is not one of them. That principle traces back to Reed, Roberts Associates v. Strauman, 40 N.Y.2d 303 (1976), and it is why covenants drafted to cover an entire industry routinely fail.

Duration and geography are judged against that interest rather than against a fixed rule. Six months covering the clients you personally served is easier to enforce than two years covering all of New York State. Courts can also enforce a covenant in part, cutting it back to what is reasonable rather than voiding it outright, which is why an overbroad agreement is not automatically a safe one to ignore.

What We Handle

  • Review before you sign. Offer letters often bundle a non-compete with confidentiality and non-solicitation terms that outlast employment. We identify which restrictions would actually bind you and which are negotiable.
  • Negotiating scope. Narrowing a covenant to named clients, shortening its term or adding a carve-out for your existing book is usually achievable at the hiring stage and almost never after.
  • Leaving for a competitor. We assess what your covenant realistically prevents, what your new employer needs to know, and how to move without triggering litigation.
  • Responding to a cease-and-desist letter or an injunction application, including the preliminary-injunction standard an employer has to meet.
  • Drafting for employers. A covenant tied to identified clients and real confidential information stands a far better chance than a broad one, and is cheaper to enforce.

Non-competes rarely travel alone. The same agreement usually contains non-solicitation, confidentiality and invention-assignment terms, which are analysed differently and often survive when a non-compete does not. We review the whole document, not the one clause. See also our work on employment contracts and severance agreements, where these covenants most often appear.

The Proposed New York Ban, and Where It Stands

New York came close to banning non-competes outright. The legislature passed S3100A in June 2023, and Governor Hochul vetoed it on 22 December 2023, objecting that it lacked an income threshold and a sale-of-business carve-out.

A narrower bill followed. S4641, introduced in February 2025, would ban non-competes for workers earning less than $500,000 in average annualised cash compensation, and for health-related professionals regardless of pay. The Senate passed it on 9 June 2025, but it stalled in the Assembly Labor Committee. A substantively identical bill, S9759, was re-introduced on 6 April 2026 and sits in Senate Labor.

Three points matter for anyone weighing a covenant today. No ban is law: the BDO Seidman test still governs. The proposed bill is prospective, so it would void covenants signed after its effective date rather than rescuing anyone who signed one already. And for permitted covenants it would impose conditions of its own, including a one-year cap and paid garden leave.

There Is No Federal Ban

The Federal Trade Commission's 2024 rule banning most non-competes never took effect. It was set aside in Ryan v. FTC (N.D. Tex., 20 August 2024), the agency dropped its appeals on 5 September 2025, and the rule was removed from the Code of Federal Regulations effective 12 February 2026.

The FTC now challenges individual agreements it considers anticompetitive under Section 5 of the FTC Act rather than applying a blanket rule. That is a risk for outlier covenants, not a floor that voids the ordinary one. State law decides the typical case, and in New York that means the common-law test.

New York and New Jersey

We are admitted in both states, which matters because a covenant signed in one can be litigated in the other. New Jersey has no non-compete statute either, and its courts apply the Solari/Whitmyer reasonableness framework, which resembles New York's but is not identical. Where an employee lives in one state, works in another and the agreement names a third state's law, the choice-of-law clause becomes the first thing worth examining. Our New Jersey employment practice handles the same work across the Hudson.