MARY KEATING: Contracts will often say you cannot walk away with our contact lists. Can that be enforced? Probably not, but you can go to court and you can convince a judge to make the employee stop that new job where they are trying to bring the customers over to their new employer. You can stop them right in their tracks and that usually is quite effective.

ROCHELLE EISENBERG: What you can do is what I would call "steal" certain proprietary information that belongs to your former employer. That would include such things as customer lists, maybe how a product is made, things like that. When an employer learns that an employee is leaving, the employer in all likelihood will not let that employee have access to the computer, will not let that employee have access to the files. That is the norm nowadays when an employee had a job where they would have had access to the customer lists and other proprietary information.