NSW Restraint period - Is it enforceable?

[stratpat08]

I have recently left my job and started my own business in the property management industry. There is a Restraint Clause in my employment contract for accepting instructions from their clients and soliciting. The contract states the restraint period is:
12 months, if 12 month is not enforceable than
6 months, if 6 months is not enforceable than
3 months.
Their clients have contacted me to take over the management of their property when the contract expires in February, I left my previous employer six months so it will be eight months in total since I left the previous employer. Can they enforce the restraint period, should I wait the full 12 months?

 

[Tim W]

If the clients contact you, with no soliciting on your part, then you're pretty much good to go.
Expect your former employer to be cranky regardless, and to make a bunch of threats.

Don't worry too much about the restraint of trade clause - they are almost never interpreted as
a way to stop a former employee from working in their field on their own account.
Rather, they are more commonly upheld as a way to prevent somebody who sells a business
from setting up a new, competing, business "next door" (so to speak) to the one they just sold,
and cashed-in on.

In cases such as yours, the biggest hazard is not always the restraint clause.
Rather, it's the very real possibility that your former employer
will put it about in the market that you were sacked (rather than resigned), and
that you are something like incompetent and/or unreliable.
In which case, you stomp him like a beetle under a boot with a defamation action.