A judge will end up judging cases involving this and deciding whether the trade secret seems reasonable and it seems like a huge gamble to risk jail over getting cute with it
People here frequently seem to interpret the law like it's a videogame that always executes in a reliable way and can therefore be gamed through obvious loopholes, rather than being a series of guidelines that give the people enforcing them a useful/terrifying latitude in both interpretation and enforcement.
> it seems like a huge gamble to risk jail over getting cute with it
That seems very naive. Judges don’t usually jail companies for labor issues.
At best the company would have to pay comp’ for the non-compete, though realistically the most that’d happen is the non-compete gets struck down and the employee gets saddled with the bills.
And that’s if you don’t get a “business friendly” judge who decides some nonsense like the ratio of water to secret sauce syrup is a trade secret so the NCC is valid and you can’t work in any place of eating for 5 years.
