Stopping a Departing Employee From Poaching the Client List

The situation

Wilson worked full-time as a line cook, and Darius worked as a landscaper. On the side, the two of them ran a small supply business, sourcing bulk mulch, soil, and hardscaping materials at wholesale rates and reselling them to a rotating roster of about a dozen landscaping crews around Richmond Hill and the surrounding area. It was not a large operation, but the margins were decent and the client relationships had taken years to build, mostly through word of mouth and reliable delivery scheduling.

To keep it running while they both held other jobs, Wilson and Darius hired Reza as a dispatcher and coordinator. Reza managed the client contact list, negotiated delivery windows, and had access to the pricing sheets that set out what each crew paid depending on order volume and how long they had been a customer. It was a position built on trust, and for two years it worked well.

What we found

Reza gave two weeks' notice, saying he wanted to try something new. Wilson and Darius thought little of it until, four days later, three separate clients called asking why they had received a message from a new supply operation offering nearly identical pricing to what they already paid. One client forwarded a screenshot. The sender's name was Reza's, and the phone number matched a new account he had set up days earlier — while still on their payroll and still holding their client list.

Wilson pulled the delivery software's activity log and found that Reza had exported the full client contact list and pricing sheet to a personal email account nine days before handing in his notice. In the days since, at least five regular clients had been contacted directly with offers to switch suppliers at a small discount, timed to land before Reza's official last day. Two had already told Wilson they were considering the switch.

There was no written non-compete agreement — the business had never gotten around to putting one in place. But Ontario law does not require a written non-compete for this kind of claim to work. Every employee owes their employer a duty of good faith while still employed, and confidential business information such as a client list and pricing structure can be protected even without a signed agreement, particularly where the employee took it deliberately and used it to compete before their employment even ended. The clock, though, was the real problem: every day that passed meant another client conversation, another discount offered, another relationship at risk of being permanently redirected.

What we did

1. Assessed the case for urgent injunctive relief the same day. An injunction is a court order requiring someone to stop doing something (or, less often, to do something) before the underlying dispute is fully resolved at trial. Courts do not grant them lightly — the applicant has to show there is a real legal claim to be tried, that waiting for a normal trial would cause harm that money cannot later fix, and that granting the order causes less unfairness than refusing it. Here, an ongoing pattern of contacting the same client list every day, with no way to know afterward how many conversations had happened or what was said, was the kind of harm that is genuinely difficult to put a number on later — a strong basis for urgency.
2. Sent an immediate written demand. Before going to court, we sent Reza a letter the same afternoon setting out the breach of confidence and duty of good faith, demanding he stop contacting the client list immediately, return or delete the exported data, and confirm this in writing by the next business day. This step matters even in a rush: courts want to see that a party tried to resolve things directly before asking for an order, and a documented refusal or non-response strengthens the case for urgency.
3. Preserved the evidence properly. We advised Wilson and Darius not to touch Reza's old email or delivery-software account beyond what was needed to confirm the export, and to save the client screenshots, the activity log, and the export timestamp exactly as they were. Evidence gathered carelessly, or after the fact, is far easier for the other side to challenge later.
4. Filed an emergency motion for an interim injunction at the Superior Court. Injunctions fall outside what Small Claims Court can order — it can award money, but it has no power to issue a restraining order like this one — so the application went to the Superior Court, which has that equitable jurisdiction. Because Reza had not responded to the demand letter and the pattern of solicitation was continuing, we asked the court to hear the motion on an urgent basis rather than through the normal scheduling timeline.
5. Negotiated a consent order to avoid a contested hearing. Once served with the motion material and the activity log, Reza's position weakened considerably — the export timestamp predating his resignation was hard to explain away. Rather than argue the motion in front of a judge, his lawyer agreed to a consent interim injunction: Reza would stop contacting anyone on the list, delete the exported data, and confirm compliance in an affidavit. A consent order carries the same enforcement weight as one imposed after argument, and it resolved the urgent part of the problem within days instead of weeks.
6. Pursued the financial loss separately in Small Claims Court. The injunction stopped the ongoing harm but did not compensate for the two clients who had already shifted a portion of their orders elsewhere during the gap. We calculated the loss at roughly $14,000 — the estimated value of one month's lost orders from the two affected clients, based on their average monthly spend over the prior year — and filed a Small Claims Court action against Reza for that amount, since it fell comfortably within that court's monetary limit and did not need the Superior Court's involvement.

The outcome

The interim injunction held. Reza confirmed by affidavit that the exported list and pricing sheet had been deleted, and the direct solicitation of clients stopped immediately. Wilson and Darius reached out to the two clients who had been approached, explained what had happened, and both stayed with the business once the discount offer disappeared along with the competing operation.

The Small Claims Court claim for the roughly $14,000 in diverted orders settled a few months later for about $9,500, with Reza paying it in installments rather than contesting the claim at trial — a common outcome once the underlying facts, especially a dated export log, are hard to dispute. Wilson and Darius came out of it with their client list intact, a documented record of what had happened, and a lesson about what they needed to put in writing going forward.

Within a month of the injunction, they had a written confidentiality and non-solicitation agreement in place for the next person hired into a client-facing role, along with a rule limiting who could export the full client list from the delivery software at all.

What you can learn from this