The statute that voided this non-compete was not the one anyone was arguing about

What happened

Community Home Physicians had a contract with a Northwestern Medicine hospital to provide transitional care management services. It assigned one of its employees, Elizabeth De La Mora, to work at the hospital and run the case management program there.

She had signed an employment agreement and a separate non-competition agreement containing covenants not to compete and not to solicit. She then applied for and accepted a job with the hospital itself. Community Home Physicians lost the entire service line and sued her for breach of contract and breach of fiduciary duty.

The circuit court dismissed the amended complaint. The Third District affirmed.

The statute nobody was arguing about

The employer's contract claim ran into the Nurse Agency Licensing Act, which restricts covenants not to compete in that regulated space and defines what counts as one.

Faced with that, the employer argued its provision was a non-solicitation clause, not a covenant not to compete, and pointed to how the Freedom to Work Act defines a non-solicitation covenant. The court declined to import that definition. The question on appeal was not whether the clause fit the Freedom to Work Act's category. It was whether the clause was a covenant not to compete as the Nurse Agency Licensing Act defines that term. Different statute, different definition, and the one that governed was the one attached to the licensed activity.

That is the first lesson, and it is not really about nurses. Illinois regulates restrictive covenants in more than one place. The Freedom to Work Act gets the attention because it applies broadly, but industry-specific statutes sit on top of it and can be dispositive. If your business operates in a licensed field, whether that is staffing, health care, or something else with its own licensing act, the governing rule may not be the one in the general employment materials your template came from.

Taking a job with your employer's client

The second holding has much wider reach.

The employer also argued that De La Mora had violated the provision barring certain solicitations, and separately breached her duty of loyalty, because she communicated with the hospital about being hired and accepted the offer while still employed. The court rejected both. It found no authority, and located none through its own research, for the proposition that an employee seeking employment at another organization while employed constitutes a solicitation of any kind, even where that organization is the employer's own customer.

The fiduciary duty claim failed with it.

Why this matters

This scenario is common and it feels like a betrayal to the employer every time. You place your person at a client. The client sees the work, likes the person, and hires them. Your service line goes with them. Whatever else that is, on this reasoning it is not solicitation, and the fact that the employee took the job while still on your payroll does not change the analysis.

For employers, the response is contractual and commercial rather than a lawsuit after the fact. If the risk you actually care about is a client hiring your placed staff, the provision that addresses it sits in your agreement with the client, in the form of a no-hire or conversion fee term, not in the covenant with the employee. The employee-side covenant is doing different work, and this decision shows it will not stretch to cover this.

For employees, the point is narrower than it may look. This case says that applying and accepting is not itself solicitation. It does not say that taking confidential information with you, or recruiting colleagues on your way out, is safe. Those are different claims and they behave differently.

A note on precedential status

This is an order entered under Illinois Supreme Court Rule 23, so it is not precedent. Because it was entered after January 1, 2021, it may be cited for its persuasive value under Rule 23(e)(1). Treat it as a well-reasoned indication of how a panel thought about these questions, not as controlling authority.