Brian Hall

Amazon’s attempt to enforce a non-compete agreement with a former marketing executive who took a job at Google caused a splash this week in the tech industry, where the restrictive contracts are a lightning rod.

But it’s not just Amazon taking heat. Critics are also taking Washington state lawmakers to task for failing to implement broader restrictions on non-compete agreements when they took up the issue last legislative session.

Washington passed a law that makes it more difficult to enforce some types of non-compete agreements but set a salary threshold that doesn’t protect many high-paid tech workers from litigation, including Brian Hall.

Hall left his role as vice president of product marketing for Amazon Web Services in March and took a senior product marketing job with Google Cloud in early April. Amazon sued Hall, claiming the new role violates the terms of his non-compete agreement and risks exposing valuable competitive information to one of its biggest rivals.

Amazon took it a step further a few days later, asking the court to block Hall from editing and summarizing keynote speeches and slides for the upcoming Google Cloud Next conference in his new job with the rival cloud platform — saying the work “threatens immediate and irreparable harm to Amazon” due to his inside knowledge of its secret cloud plans.

Though it can be difficult for employers to enforce non-compete agreements in Washington, Amazon was able to bring the case because of the way the new law is structured. Companies can attempt to enforce a non-compete in the state if the agreement meets the following criteria:

  • The employee earns more than $100,000 a year
  • The employer discloses terms of the non-compete when making an offer or earlier
  • The non-compete agreement doesn’t cover a period longer than 18 months

Amazon said in a court filing that Hall’s “total compensation for 2019 was seven figures and projected to increase in 2020.”

The law was designed to protect lower-level employees from over-reaching non-compete agreements but still allow companies to use the contracts to protect intellectual property. Still, it’s unusual for Amazon to go after a marketing professional, rather than someone with technical expertise.

Hall “helped develop and knows the entire confidential Amazon cloud product roadmap for 2020-21,” says Amazon in its lawsuit, filed May 18. “Virtually every day, Hall worked with Amazon’s most senior cloud executives to create and execute those plans. As a result, he was entrusted with an unusually broad view into Amazon’s cloud product plans; its priorities; and its competitive strategy.”

Hall is the latest subject in a series of lawsuits Amazon has brought to enforce non-compete agreements in Washington. Amazon similarly sued Philip Moyer, a former Amazon Web Services sales executive, after he took a job with Google Cloud last year. A judge ultimately agreed to limit some aspects of Moyer’s role at Google for the term of the agreement but took Amazon to task for “unreasonable” aspects of the contract and for making “no attempt to tailor its non-compete restrictions to the job it hired Moyer to perform.”

The lawsuits reflect an ongoing rivalry between Amazon and Google in the cloud. Google opened a cloud campus on the edge of Amazon’s headquarters in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood, ratcheting up the competition for cloud talent against Amazon, Microsoft, and others.

Amazon’s liberal use and enforcement of non-compete agreements is the subject of controversy and debate in the tech industry. Angel investor Chris DeVore slammed the lawsuit and Washington state’s law for doing “nothing to stop this abusive labor practice by the state’s most influential employers.”

Other prominent tech leaders took to Twitter to discuss the case, including Joseph Williams, the director of the Seattle Research Center for the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and a former tech policy advisor to Washington Gov. Jay Inslee.

A judge sided with Amazon on a preliminary issue in the dispute this week, preventing Hall from reviewing and editing speeches for the Google Cloud Next conference pending the outcome of a larger hearing set for July 31 in the case.

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