Legal wisdom comes from more than law books. Right now, Attorney Ted Haller is reading A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. In the book, there’s a great lecture by a fictitious law professor about the importance of contracts:
“Contracts are not just sheets of paper promising you a job, or a house, or an inheritance: in its purest, truest, broadest sense, contracts govern every realm of law. When we choose to live in a society, we choose to live under a contract, and to abide by the rules that a contract dictates for us—the Constitution itself is a contract, albeit a malleable contract…”
We love this passage because employment law certainly can concern contracts, including onerous noncompetes. But employment law is mostly about the unwritten contract between employer and employee that our society depends on. The employee will work hard and honestly, in exchange for the employer providing a paycheck and fair treatment. When the employer is not fair—when the employer discriminates, retaliates, harasses—then the employer has breached the unwritten contract.
And that’s where we come in, to make the employee whole again, or at least as whole as law and life allow. In A Little Life, the professor goes on to say, “You will learn about the obligations we have to one another as members of society, and how far society should go in enforcing those obligations.” At Haller Kwan LLP, we believe our goal is to ensure society is, in fact, enforcing those obligations.