Stopping a Former Employee From Poaching Client Files in Hamilton

The situation

Etienne owned a franchised home-services business in Hamilton, the kind that runs on a steady book of repeat customers and a call centre that books the appointments. He employed a small team to answer the phones, schedule jobs, and keep the customer database current — pricing history, service dates, contact details, notes on what each household wanted. Building that database had taken years of unglamorous, incremental work: a few new households a week, retained through reliable service and follow-up calls after every job. His bookkeeper, Tarek, kept the financial side running and was the first person to notice something was wrong.

One of the call-centre representatives, Karim, gave two weeks' notice and left to start a competing service in the same city. Within days, several long-standing customers called Etienne's office to cancel upcoming appointments, mentioning that "the same guy who used to book us in" had reached out directly with a lower quote. Tarek pulled the database access logs and found that Karim had exported a large portion of the active customer list to a personal email account roughly a week before resigning — not a handful of contacts he happened to remember, but a structured export covering years of accumulated customer relationships.

Etienne came to Treadstone Law with a narrow, urgent question: could he stop the calls before more customers left, and could he get back some of what he had already lost. He was not interested in a drawn-out lawsuit against a former employee earning a modest wage; he wanted the solicitation to stop and a fair accounting of the damage done.

The legal problem

Two things complicated the picture. First, the underlying dispute was small. The customers who had already left represented roughly $22,000 in expected revenue over the coming year — squarely inside Small Claims Court's monetary jurisdiction, the stream built for claims up to a set dollar ceiling with simplified procedure and no formal discovery. Ordinarily that is where a dispute this size belongs.

But Small Claims Court cannot grant an injunction — a court order requiring someone to stop doing something, or to do something, before the underlying dispute is fully argued out. Only the Superior Court has that power. So even though the money at stake was modest, stopping the ongoing harm meant filing in a court built for far larger cases, with the cost and formality that implies.

Second, Karim had never signed a non-solicitation or non-competition agreement. Many call-centre and front-line roles do not include one, and courts are cautious about restricting a former employee's ability to earn a living in the same field. What Etienne did have was a stronger and simpler claim: the customer list itself was confidential business information, and Karim had taken it without authorization and was actively using it. Ontario law protects a business's confidential information — including customer lists compiled through effort and investment — independent of whether a non-compete was ever signed. Courts weigh three things before granting an urgent injunction: whether there is a serious issue to be tried, whether the party seeking the order would suffer harm that money could not adequately fix if the order were refused, and whether granting the order does less overall damage than refusing it. Ongoing loss of an established customer base, built over years, is the kind of harm that is genuinely difficult to value after the fact — which supported the case for urgency, but did not guarantee a win at a full hearing weeks or months away.

What we did

1. Preserved the evidence first. Before sending anything to Karim, we had Tarek export and date-stamp the access logs showing exactly when the customer list was pulled and by whom, plus copies of the cancellation calls logged by remaining staff. An injunction motion lives or dies on the strength of the affidavit evidence behind it, and evidence gathered after the other side is alerted is always weaker than evidence gathered before.
2. Sent a formal demand before filing anything. We wrote to Karim directly, setting out the confidentiality obligation that survives any employment relationship regardless of a signed agreement, demanding an immediate stop to any contact with the exported customers, destruction of the data, and an accounting of which customers had already been contacted. A demand letter costs little and sometimes ends the matter — and even when it does not, it demonstrates to a judge later that the applicant tried to resolve things before escalating.
3. Prepared the Superior Court application while the demand was outstanding. We drafted the notice of application and the supporting affidavit so that if Karim ignored the letter, we could move for urgent interim relief within days rather than weeks. Courts hear genuinely urgent injunction motions on short notice, but the applicant still has to show the paperwork is ready and the harm is immediate — a rushed, thin motion is often worse than no motion at all.
4. Opened a settlement channel once Karim retained his own lawyer. Karim's response confirmed he had taken the list but disputed how many customers he had actually solicited versus how many had called him unprompted. Rather than push straight to a contested hearing, we proposed a negotiated resolution: a defined list of the customers already contacted, a binding undertaking not to solicit any of them going forward, permanent deletion of the exported data with written confirmation, and a payment toward the business Etienne had already lost.
5. Held the line on the parts that mattered most. Etienne's priority was stopping the bleeding, not maximizing a lawsuit against a former employee with limited means to pay a judgment. We focused negotiating effort on the non-solicitation undertaking and data deletion — the terms that protected the remaining customer base going forward — and treated the compensation figure as secondary.

The outcome

The matter settled before any motion was argued in court. Karim signed a written undertaking not to contact or accept business from any customer on the exported list for a fixed period, confirmed in writing that the data had been permanently deleted from his personal accounts and his new business's systems, and paid Etienne roughly $9,500 toward the business already diverted — well below the $22,000 Etienne had estimated as his full exposure, but recovered without the cost, delay, and uncertainty of a contested hearing.

It was a partial outcome, honestly told. Etienne did not recover the full value of the lost accounts, and a small number of customers who had already switched providers by the time the undertaking was signed did not come back — the settlement stopped further solicitation, it did not undo relationships that had already moved. Each side bore its own legal costs, which in a dispute of this size often matters as much as the headline settlement number. Tarek's early evidence-gathering was what made the compromise possible on reasonable terms; without dated proof of when the data was exported and by whom, Karim's lawyer would have had far less reason to settle on Etienne's terms at all.

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