Talk about a win for employees.
Not only did U.S. District Court Judge Billy Roy Wilson recently rule in favor of a group of workers who were sued for quitting their jobs to join a competitor, but he awarded the lawyers who represented them attorneys’ fees and costs in the case.
The total amount?
$203,891.80.
The case began after Stuart C. Irby Co. of Jackson, Mississippi, bought Treadway Electric Co. of Little Rock, a provider of electrical supplies, in December 2011.
Treadway operated 14 locations in Arkansas, including a branch in Conway.
Three of the workers at the Conway location, Brandon Tipton, Michael Gilbert and Stephen Padgett, quit in 2013 to join Irby’s competitor, Wholesale Electric Supply Co. of Texarkana, Texas.
Irby then filed a federal civil suit against the workers and Wholesale Electric.
Irby argued that the workers had signed a noncompete agreement about a decade earlier when they were Treadway employees. Irby sued the workers for breach of contract and Wholesale for interfering with a contractual relationship.
The workers and Wholesale asked that the case be thrown out, and Judge Wilson agreed.
“A noncompete agreement that prohibits ordinary competition is not enforceable,” Wilson wrote in his order on the defendants’ motion for summary judgment.
He added that the employees “were as free to walk away from Irby as Irby was to walk away from them.”
The defendants’ attorneys, Brent Langdon of the Langdon Davis LLP firm in Texarkana, Texas, and Gary Corum of Little Rock, asked Wilson to order Irby to pay their attorneys’ fees and court costs for defending the case, which totaled more than $200,000.
Irby’s lead attorney, Mark Fijman of Phelps Dunbar LLP of Jackson, objected and said the fees and costs should only be around $24,000.
Wilson awarded Langdon and Corum the total amount they asked for.
Irby has appealed the case to the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Fijman wasn’t immediately available for comment Thursday. Irby’s Arkansas attorney in the case, Jeff Spillyards of Mitchell Williams Selig Gates & Woodyard PLLC of Little Rock, declined to comment and referred calls to the Phelps Dunbar firm.
Langdon said in a statement to Whispers that from the time that the case was filed, Wholesale believed “that the law did not support the allegations asserted by Irby in its complaint.”
He also said he thinks the 8th Circuit will uphold Wilson’s ruling.
“We are very pleased that Arkansas law supports an award of fees and costs to prevailing defendants, particularly on contract claims not supported by the evidence,” Langdon said in the statement.
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