New York Employment Agreements

I recently wrote about new resources for identifying California Employment Agreements to use in your business, or for drafting documents for your clients.  The rationale is clear – negotiating effective employment agreements that are applicable to your jurisdiction is essential to enforcing your rights appropriately.  Additionally, the ability to leverage legal agreements drafted by top law firms enables business owners and lawyers alike to find new ways of constructing deal terms or simply getting documents turned around more quickly.

This of course applies to many state jurisdictions within the United States, not the least of which is the ability to quickly find and browse across thousands of New York employment agreements.  If you need to find New York employment agreements using full text search criteria or other tools, you can do that as well using these employment agreement search tools.

Using California Employment Agreement Forms

A couple of months ago I wrote about noncompete covenants in California, and how the peculiarities of California employment law around noncompetition issues impacts hiring and firing California employees as well as buying businesses in California.

Many times, when small business owners are looking for an employment agreement form, they may just download a document or use an old template.  This works in the majority of cases when no legal disputes regarding employment arises.  Of course, attorneys and experienced managers understand that competent contract authoring is all about controlling how disputes are resolved – if there is no dispute, the contract language doesn’t come into play.  To sophisticated managers, attorneys and investors, that seems a lot like crossing your fingers and hoping for the best.

Accordingly, it’s critical that employers and attorneys find templates and work product precedent that are geared towards the relevant jurisdiction.  You can search across thousands of employment agreements by governing law provisions here.  In the case of California employment agreements, here is a great resource to browse thousands of California Employment Agreements, or you can combine full text searching across California employment agreements.

In our business, we’ve been fortunate enough to avoid any serious employment related disputes that have resulted in litigation.  However, we recently have had to deal with a specific example of a former consultant hiring away an employee despite a variety of non-compete and non-solicitation clauses, and the existence of appropriate contract language has been extremely helpful to us in negotiating an appropriate resolution.

Please let me know if you are aware of any additional resources we can share, or comment directly below.

Finding Legal Documents and Agreements from Top Law Firms

As I’ve written before, when you are negotiating a deal, it can be extremely helpful to find similar legal documents and agreements drafted by top law firms.  This allows you to:

1. Save time drafting the deal language by leveraging someone else’s ideas (estimates range up to 65% of the drafting time)
2. Learn new ways to structure deal terms, such as pricing arrangements, guarantees, termination clauses, etc.
3. Gain competitive intelligence by seeing how other companies in the industry have structured their deals
4. If you’re negotiating against a particular law firm, or you know of a law firm with a very strong practice area that relates to your deal, you can research that law firm’s deals as well.

The first challenge, once you’ve decided to find legal agreements from a specific law firm, is to find a resource that allows you to search for the firm’s documents.  Of course, you can always use Google (and that may be how you found this blog, so I’m not complaining!).  This can be useful if you are just looking for 1 or 2 examples of a firm’s documents, but not if you want to really be able to search across a large number of that firm’s documents – there are just too many search results that are not on point. 

Let’s use a search for “Simpson Thacher legal agreements” (without the quotes) to illustrate this.  Google, in about a billionth of a second, comes back with 348,000 results.  That’s great, but a quick scan of the first several pages reveals that most of these links are not to Simpson Thacher legal agreements, but instead they are point to Simpson that may or may not involve the word agreements.

By contrast, I’ve linked to a resource above, which contains millions of profiled legal agreements and clauses from top law firms.  You can use the advanced legal document search tools to search specifically for Simpson Thacher agreements, search for agreement clauses, or jump straight to browsing hundreds of Simpson Thacher legal agreements and documents.  This allows a deal attorney or other professional to very quickly drill down and find exactly what is needed to better negotiate and draft the deal.