Contracts of employment: City-wide restriction on competition was too wide

A restrictive covenant preventing former employees of an employment agency in the City of London from dealing with and soliciting custom from all 6,000 clients of their former employer was too wide. In Office Angels Ltd v Rainer-Thomas and O'Connor the High Court holds the restriction to be unenforceable because the employees had known only 100 of those clients at their branch of the agency. A restriction seeking to prevent the former employees from engaging in employment agency work in an area including most of the City was, according to the Court of Appeal [1991] IRLR 214, unreasonably onerous and also invalid.