A key salesperson resigns on Friday. By Monday, your best accounts are getting calls from a competitor. If you are dealing with a former employee who took your customer list, Florida law gives you real claims and fast remedies, but only if the list qualifies as a trade secret or a written agreement covers it. The window to act is short, and what you do in the first week usually determines whether you get an injunction.
This post walks through whether your list is protectable, which claims to bring, what you can recover, and the immediate steps that preserve your leverage. Jimerson Birr represents Florida businesses across the state in trade secret protection and business litigation matters.
Can You Sue a Former Employee for Taking Your Customer List in Florida?
Yes. Florida recognizes several independent causes of action, and you can plead them together. The two workhorses are statutory trade secret misappropriation and breach of a written restrictive covenant.
You do not need a signed non-compete to sue, but you do need to show either that the list meets the statutory definition of a trade secret or that a contract independently barred the employee’s conduct.
The practical question is rarely “can I sue.” It is whether you can get a judge to enter a temporary injunction in the first few weeks, before the accounts are gone for good.
Is a Customer List Actually a Trade Secret Under Florida Law?
Sometimes. Under the Florida Uniform Trade Secrets Act (FUTSA), a customer list is a trade secret only if it derives independent economic value from not being generally known or readily ascertainable, and you took reasonable efforts to keep it secret. See Fla. Stat. § 688.002(4).
Both halves of that test get litigated. Most cases are won or lost on the second half.
What Makes a Customer List Protectable
Florida courts protect lists that reflect real compilation effort and cannot be rebuilt from public sources. In East v. Aqua Gaming, Inc., 805 So. 2d 932 (Fla. 2d DCA 2001), the court upheld protection for a list of casino contacts, phone numbers, and addresses built over years and distilled from a much larger universe of prospects into actual viable customers.
The features that tend to carry the day:
- The list identifies actual buyers, not merely everyone in the industry.
- It includes non-public data such as pricing history, order volume, decision-maker names, contract renewal dates, or margin information.
- It took meaningful time and money to assemble.
- It was stored behind access controls and covered by confidentiality and non-disclosure agreements.
Sethscot Collection, Inc. v. Drbul, 669 So. 2d 1076 (Fla. 3d DCA 1996), draws the line cleanly. The court refused to protect a roster of roughly 9,600 prospective organizations compiled from publicly available materials, but did protect the list of roughly 6,800 organizations that had actually placed orders over eight years.
When Florida Courts Refuse to Protect a Customer List
A list is not a trade secret if a competitor could recreate it with ordinary effort. In Templeton v. Creative Loafing Tampa, Inc., 552 So. 2d 288 (Fla. 2d DCA 1989), the advertiser list was unprotectable because anyone could rebuild it by reading past editions of the publication.
Courts also will not stop a former employee from using general industry knowledge, personal relationships, or contacts the employee developed independently. That distinction matters if your top producer brought the book of business with them.
The other common failure point is your own conduct. If the list circulated by unsecured email, sat on a shared drive with no restrictions, or was never subject to a confidentiality policy, expect the defense to argue you never made reasonable efforts to protect it. Auditing your trade secret protection policies and records management practices before a dispute is the cheapest insurance available.
What Claims Should You Bring?
Plead the statutory trade secret claim first, add any contract claims, and be selective about the rest. Overpleading invites a displacement fight and dilutes your injunction motion.
Trade Secret Misappropriation Under FUTSA
FUTSA is the primary vehicle. It authorizes injunctions against actual or threatened misappropriation under § 688.003, damages for actual loss plus unjust enrichment under § 688.004(1), and exemplary damages of up to twice the compensatory award for willful and malicious misappropriation under § 688.004(2).
Attorney’s fees are available under § 688.005 for willful and malicious misappropriation, and the limitations period is three years from discovery under § 688.007.
One caution: § 688.008(1) displaces conflicting state-law tort and restitution claims based on the same misappropriation. A civil theft or conversion count premised on identical facts is vulnerable to dismissal. Our related post on proving trade secret misappropriation covers the evidentiary side in detail.
Federal Claims Under the Defend Trade Secrets Act
The Defend Trade Secrets Act supplies a federal civil cause of action at 18 U.S.C. § 1836(b)(1) where the trade secret relates to a product or service used in interstate commerce. Remedies parallel FUTSA, including exemplary damages up to twice compensatory damages.
Section 1836(b)(2) also permits ex parte civil seizure, but only in extraordinary circumstances and subject to eight statutory findings. Treat it as a rare tool, not a default.
Federal court is often worth it when the competitor is out of state or the evidence sits on cloud systems in multiple jurisdictions.
Breach of a Non-Solicitation or Confidentiality Agreement
If you have a signed agreement, this is frequently your strongest claim because you skip the trade secret fight entirely. Under Fla. Stat. § 542.335, the covenant must be in a writing signed by the person against whom enforcement is sought, and it must protect a legitimate business interest.
Section 542.335(1)(b)3. expressly lists substantial relationships with specific prospective or existing customers, patients, or clients as a legitimate business interest. That provision is built for exactly this scenario.
Duration matters. For a former employee unconnected to a sale of a business, § 542.335(1)(d)1. presumes six months or less reasonable and more than two years unreasonable. Where the covenant is predicated on a trade secret, § 542.335(1)(e) extends the presumptions to five years reasonable and more than ten years unreasonable. Drafting the covenant to reference the trade secret gives you materially more runway, a point we address further in our discussion of non-compete and non-solicitation agreements and in this post on legitimate business interests in referral relationships.
Duty of Loyalty, Tortious Interference, and Claims Against the New Employer
Conduct that began before the resignation opens additional doors. An employee who downloaded files, diverted deals, or recruited coworkers while still on payroll may face a breach of fiduciary duty claim.
If the competitor knew about the covenant and hired anyway, consider tortious interference with an advantageous business relationship or contract, plus aiding and abetting or civil conspiracy theories. Naming the new employer often changes settlement dynamics faster than anything else, because that defendant usually has both insurance and a reputation to protect.
Where the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act Usually Falls Short
The CFAA offers a civil remedy at 18 U.S.C. § 1030(g), but it is a weaker fit than most employers expect. In Van Buren v. United States, 593 U.S. 374 (2021), the Supreme Court held that a person “exceeds authorized access” only by obtaining information in areas of a computer that are off-limits to them. See the official opinion.
After Van Buren, an employee who was authorized to use your CRM and downloaded the list for a disloyal purpose generally does not violate the CFAA. The claim becomes viable where access was truly unauthorized, such as post-termination logins or use of a coworker’s credentials. Those scenarios also raise data privacy and cybersecurity questions worth evaluating early.
What Remedies Are Realistically Available?
Injunctive relief is the point. Money follows later, and often for less than clients expect.
- Temporary and permanent injunctions. A properly supported injunction motion can bar use of the list and solicitation of the affected accounts. Expect to post a bond, and expect the court to narrow overbroad requests, as the appellate court did in East.
- Compensatory damages. Lost profits on diverted accounts plus the defendant’s unjust enrichment, or a reasonable royalty.
- Exemplary damages. Up to twice the compensatory award under FUTSA or the DTSA for willful and malicious conduct.
- Attorney’s fees. Available under FUTSA § 688.005 and under § 542.335 fee provisions, and available to a prevailing defendant on a bad-faith claim. The exposure runs both directions.
- Forensic preservation and expedited discovery. Frequently more valuable than the eventual judgment, because device images and cloud logs are what prove the download.
How Does the 2025 CHOICE Act Affect Your Leverage?
Florida’s CHOICE Act, enacted as chapter 2025-213 and codified at Fla. Stat. §§ 542.41 through 542.45, created a separate and far more employer-friendly regime for higher-earning employees. Its constitutional effective date is August 15, 2025.
For covered employees, meaning those whose salary exceeds twice the annual mean wage of the applicable Florida county, the Act authorizes garden leave and non-compete agreements of up to four years and provides for a mandatory preliminary injunction that the employee must rebut by clear and convincing evidence.
If your account executives and sales leadership are not yet under CHOICE Act agreements, that is the single highest-leverage document change available to a Florida employer right now.
Note that the CHOICE Act supplements § 542.335 rather than replacing it, and health care practitioners defined in § 456.001 are excluded. Separately, the Federal Trade Commission’s 2024 non-compete rule was set aside nationwide in Ryan LLC v. FTC and the agency formally acceded to that vacatur in September 2025. The rule is not enforceable, though the FTC has signaled case-by-case enforcement instead.
What Should You Do in the First Week?
Move on evidence preservation before you move on pleadings. Judges grant injunctions to plaintiffs who show a clear forensic record and deny them to plaintiffs who show suspicion.
- Suspend deletion. Issue a litigation hold and stop any automatic purge of email, endpoint backups, and cloud logs.
- Preserve the device. Do not let IT wipe and reissue the laptop or phone. Image it.
- Pull the access logs. Export CRM download reports, VPN and SSO records, USB events, and personal-email forwarding activity for the 90 days before resignation.
- Locate the paperwork. Find the signed offer letter, confidentiality agreement, restrictive covenant, employee handbook acknowledgment, and any severance agreement.
- Document the secrecy measures. Assemble the access controls, password policies, and confidentiality markings that establish reasonable efforts under § 688.002(4).
- Quantify the harm. Identify which accounts were contacted, what they bought historically, and what has already moved.
- Send a preservation and cease-and-desist letter. Address it to both the former employee and the new employer, which also establishes the new employer’s knowledge for interference purposes.
- Decide on venue quickly. State or federal, and whether the facts justify expedited discovery or third-party subpoenas.
How Do You Prevent the Next One?
Prevention is a document and offboarding problem, not a litigation problem. The employers who win these cases built the record years earlier.
Tighten agreements so covenants are predicated on trade secrets and, where salaries qualify, brought under the CHOICE Act. Limit CRM export permissions. Build a real offboarding checklist covering device return, credential revocation, and a signed acknowledgment of continuing obligations.
Guidance on the hiring and termination side, on transitioning executives, and on broader employment law compliance closes most of these gaps. Companies in data-heavy sectors should also review their technology industry exposure, since customer data in those businesses is often the entire asset.
The Bottom Line
A former employee who took your customer list is actionable in Florida, but your recovery depends on facts you either created before the departure or preserved in the first days after it. Protectable lists are the ones that were treated as secret. Enforceable covenants are the ones drafted to the statute.
If a departure has already happened, the priority order is preservation, then documentation, then filing. If nothing has happened yet, the priority is your agreements. Contact Jimerson Birr to discuss unfair competition and restrictive covenant enforcement or a review of your trade secret protection posture.