Disgruntled ex employee using my clients

[NotYouNaanBread]

A disgruntled ex employee has started her own business and is representing a list of my clients (who she took orders from when she worked for me) as clients of her own business, which they are not.

I resent the fact that she lost my business 10's of thousands of pounds, was a horror when I let her go and now she is doing this.

Is it legal? Can she be prevented from doing this?

She has a sort of "our clients" page on her site listing all of my top clients (super famous names).

Was it in her contract to not work with your clients for a period of time after ceasing to work for you?

No, but she is not working with them at all, she is pretending she is on her site.

Well haven't you contacted the clients to explain and take over?

And surely of they think that then you'll get the payment.

Did she actually do any work for the clients while she was working for you? Is she saying she's still working for them or she has done work for them previously? It's probably down to your client to ask her to take their names off her web site if she's claiming she is working for them now when she isn't as it's misleading.

How have you lost money by her falsely claiming your clients are hers?

Is she billing them for work you have done? Have you spoken to your clients to let them know that she no longer works for you?

So her website claims to have these clients, but she doesn't really have them.

You're not losing any money or any business to her.
She's not getting any money out of these clients.

Why do you care?

The clients can contact her and ask her to remove their names from her site, but it's nothing whatsoever to do with you.

This isn't uncommon. I used to work for a large multinational company and we often had our staff headhunted by a smaller (but still large) company, who would then claim any client for whom any of the people they'd recruited had ever worked on their list of clients.

There's nothing you can do about it AFAIK; you could point it out to your clients and if they object then they can ask her to cease and desist, but it might make you look over-dramatic or petty - depends on the relationship you have with your clients.

Everyone who said "what are you losing" - it's a marketing thing. The former employee is operating in direct competition with the OP and is making her company look more prestigious and established by using the OP's credentials. So she's likely to get more business than she would have done if her website said honestly "we are a brand new company and our only clients so far are my cousin Bob and his mate". And if she hadn't got that new business there's a reasonable chance that some of it would have gone to the OP.

I agree. The clients who are misrepresented as having been her clients could object - she is using their names without permission and indeed use of their names is often restrictions - most commercial contracts contain a clause saying the supplier cannot name the client even on a website without consent. If she got those names from you she may be putting you in breach of a confidentiality undertaking in your contract with those clients so you may be able to get her that way.

Next time by the way even if you do not use a solicitor for this make sure you add a non competition clause in the contract.

Also she might have taken a whole database of your clients. That is breach of database right if she copied a database, breach of your intellectual property rights.

You could try writing to the company hosting the site, once you have tried requiring her to take down the names, saying she is using your database of clients and confidential information on the site and asking them to take it down.

The best competition however is being better than she is and winning more clients.