For someone who has an offer from a competitor and a signed clause somewhere in their onboarding paperwork
The clause in front of you probably says something like two years, fifty miles, any competing business. That sentence is doing two jobs at once, and they are easy to confuse. It describes what your former employer would like to stop you doing, and it hints, imprecisely, at what a judge might actually order. Those two things overlap, but the gap between them is where most of the useful analysis lives. Working out the size of that gap, before you resign, before you sign an offer letter, before you tell anyone anything, is the whole exercise.
Start with the literal words, not the threat
Read the clause as if you were the one drafting it, sentence by sentence, and write down exactly what conduct it prohibits. Most covenants are a bundle: a non-compete, a customer non-solicit, an employee non-solicit, and a confidentiality obligation, often stacked in one paragraph with shared defined terms. The defined terms matter more than the numbers. If "Competing Business" is defined as any entity engaged in the business conducted by the company, that sweeps in product lines you never touched. If "Customer" includes prospects contacted in the last eighteen months, the list is longer than your account roster. Pin down the literal reach first, because everything else measures against it.
The protected interest comes before duration and geography
Courts across the states do not ask first whether two years is reasonable. They ask what legitimate business interest the restriction protects, and only then whether its duration and reach are tailored to that interest. The recognized interests are narrower than employers like: trade secrets and genuinely confidential information, customer relationships the employer paid you to build, and specialized training with real cost behind it. Ordinary skill you brought with you or acquired by doing the job is not a protectable interest anywhere. If nothing on that list applies to your actual role, the clause is weak on its foundation, and the time and mileage figures are close to irrelevant.
This is why two employees at the same company, with identical contract language, can get opposite answers. The salesperson who held the relationships and the back-office analyst who never met a customer are not in the same position, whatever the paperwork says. Job title tells you little. What matters is what you touched, what you knew, and whether the employer can point to something concrete it would lose. The Federal Trade Commission is responsible for competition policy affecting worker mobility, and the direction of state law has broadly moved toward demanding that employers show a real interest rather than assert one.
Duration and geography are measured, not assumed
Once the interest is identified, duration is judged by how long it takes for the advantage to decay. Customer relationships go stale; pricing information becomes obsolete when the next cycle is published; a technical process may stay valuable for years. A one-year customer restriction attached to an account cycle that turns every quarter is doing more work than the interest can support. Geography follows the same logic. A fifty-mile radius around a headquarters you visited twice is not a territory. A radius drawn around the accounts you personally covered usually is, and courts will often enforce the second version while refusing the first.
What happens to an overbroad clause then depends heavily on the state. Some courts blue-pencil, striking the offending words and enforcing the remainder. Some reform the clause to whatever they consider reasonable and enforce that. Some refuse to rewrite an employer's contract at all and void the whole thing. That difference in judicial habit changes your risk more than any single word in your agreement, which is the practical reason to get a reading from someone who appears in front of those judges.
What the decision actually costs
A consultation with an employment attorney who handles covenant work is priced either as a flat fee for a contract review and written opinion or as an hourly rate with a stated cap, and you should ask which before you book. For that money you get the clause read against your state's case law, a candid view of enforceability, and usually a sense of whether your former employer's counsel sends letters or files suit. Searching for a non compete lawyer near me is the right instinct, because state law governs and local practice knowledge is the thing you are buying.
Compare that against the alternative. A temporary restraining order hearing arrives within days of the complaint, moves fast, and costs multiples of a review even when you win. If an injunction issues, you are out of the role while the case proceeds, and the new employer, who agreed to indemnify nothing, reconsiders. Weighed against that, a few hundred to a couple thousand dollars spent before you resign buys the one thing the later fight cannot: choices that are still open.
The order to work through it
Get the signed copy, including the handbook and any equity agreement that repeats the covenant. Identify the protected interest honestly. Test duration and geography against that interest rather than against your sense of fairness. Check which state's law applies and whether the choice-of-law clause will hold. Then get the reading, and time your resignation around the answer rather than the other way round.
The document is fixed. Your exposure under it is not, and most of the room to move sits in the weeks before you hand in notice.