The retailer and cloud computing giant sued Hall, seeking to prevent him from taking his new role as a vice president in Google cloud’s marketing group because of the non-compete clause he had signed upon joining Amazon two years earlier.
Last year, Amazon succeeded in getting a federal court to place limits on the role of Philip Moyer, a former AWS sales executive who took a similar job at Google cloud.
Wide latitude
Washington state, home to Amazon’s Seattle headquarters, has no such prohibition, giving companies wide latitude to enforce non-compete clauses even in cases in which there is no evidence that former employees sought to steal trade secrets or make use of confidential information.
Ariel Kelman, AWS’s marketing chief when Hall came on board, told him he believed the company’s non-compete agreement was unenforceable, and in any case, had never been used as a basis for a lawsuit against an employee in the marketing group, Hall said in a court filing.
Google sought to have Hall work on executive speech-writing as the lawsuit played out, but Amazon objected, arguing in a court filing that work crafting speeches for a Google cloud conference could have a “real and concrete impact on the business”.
