I am not.
> The way you solicit clients from a prior company is downloading the client list, exporting to a personal drive, quitting, then using the list to poach.
Which part of this is "IP"?
The whole concept of "stealing IP" is something that was lobbied in to prevent market competition and establish monopolies. Calling a list of clients that might choose to vote with their wallets for better service "IP" is one of the most ridiculous claims I've seen here lately and pretty much proof of how this term has become a problem for modern free market society.
While IP protection itself is critical for some innovation, the way you all wield it to defend monopolization and entrenchment is a main reason to rethink what IP and protection actually gives to american economy.
I should have said conditional customer data. (Client lists, phone numbers, email addresses - basically whatever you can export out of Salesforce)
In order to poach your old company’s customers, you’ll need confidential data from your prior employer, assuming that your employer doesn’t publish their client roster publicly.
The debate is being dragged from poaching customers to how IP protections enable monopolies. That’s too big of a leap to be relevant in this thread (sorry for saying IP rather than confidential data)
If your company can only exist by blocking other companies from competition with your customer, then your company should not exist in first place.
Also, it’s a 100% fact that companies consider client rosters confidential. It’s fun to say no one can claim my name or phone number as confidential data… but that’s not how things work.
It is how things work legally. What you are confusing is the distinction between individual bits of information and a database: if a salesperson leaves and calls their old client, nobody reasonably expects them to forget about that relationship or be unable to look up a phone number.
If there’s an entire lead database, that might be a different story if it includes non-public data and the company can show that it’s treated as a valuable asset (limited access, confidentiality agreements, etc. ). If it’s something you could recreate with a few Google searches, you’ll have a hard time convincing a judge that there’s substantial value in its secrecy.