Transaction agreements generally contain a confidentiality clause that requires an employee to keep the existence and terms of a billing confidential. Employers often feel that this clause is essential to prevent the regulation from being known to all. This, they hope, should prevent reputational damage and deter other employees from asserting rights (with or without pay) in the hope of obtaining financial compensation. In the two recent Supreme Court cases, an investigation is being conducted to determine whether clauses setting an amount payable from one party to another in the event of an infringement could be valid: it has long been recognized that the rule of sanctions should only be applied in the event of a breach of contract. This has been confirmed in Cavendish Square. However, the application of the sanctions rule may depend on the fact that the corresponding obligation is defined in the contract as a primary conditional obligation or an ancillary obligation. Employers often enter into transactions to avoid litigation. The confidentiality of the comparison is sometimes essential for the employer. While simple confidentiality clauses are often included in billing conditions and are associated with enforcement mechanisms (which occurs when an infringement occurs), it is unusual for cases to occur that deal with the applicability of these clauses. In Jan Wong v. The Globe and Mail Inc., 2014 ONSC 6372, the Divisional Court of Ontario with the costs rejected with the costs an application for judicial review of an arbitrator`s decision requiring a former employee to repay more than $US 200,000 paid as part of a settlement agreement if she received statements confirming that she had received a payment.
These kinds of clauses are sometimes exactly what clients want, and they appear in different situations in practice, so you might find them: Dr. Lachlan also argued that clause 10 was a penalty and was therefore unenforceable. Dr. Lachlan argued that the culpability for the decision for which HPM had sought a judgment was not a “current debt”. The Court found that, after the fact, Lachlan had tacitly admitted that he was required to hire HPM as a “permanent and permanent obligation” for the amount owed in connection with the loans, so that clause 10 could not be a penalty. In both the Red-White and Mitsuwa cases, defendants who did not make future payments under a transaction agreement had to pay more than if they had made the payments within the allotted time.