Terminating An Injunction Regarding Confidential Information

Although the Georgia appellate courts have not issued many decisions on the new restrictive covenant statute that went into effect on May 11, 2011, they do continue to issue decisions in the area of protecting confidential information. One such decision is Mays v. Southern Resources Consultants, which came out of the Georgia Supreme Court in early June.

That case comes out of a growing field for restrictive covenant disputes: the home health care provider context. Provision of health care services in home settings is a growing industry. Because of the importance of an individual provider developing a relationship with the patient to whom the provider is providing services, this is a natural setting in which the individual provider's employer will want to use a non-compete restriction to prevent the individual provider from exploiting that relationship on behalf of a competitor. On the other hand, the individual provider will often argue that the relationship he/she developed with the patient is important for the patient's well-being and therefore that there is a public interest against enforcing a non-compete in this particular situation.

Mays involves exactly this sort of situation. The facts at issue are described in detail by the Georgia Supreme Court with so many abbreviations that a member of the military would be impressed by the opening paragraph of the decision:

Southern Resources Consultants, Inc. ("SRC") is a Residential Service Provider ("RSP"), contracting with the Georgia Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities ("DBHDD") and the Georgia Department of Community Health ("DCH") to, inter alia, operate group homes and provide care and oversight for Medicaid-funded individuals with developmental disabilities. Linda Mays ("Mays") contracted with SRC to be a Host Home Provider ("HHP") for one such woman, S.F., from approximately 2006 until May 31, 2014. S.F. became dissatisfied with SRC, and requested that her case manager, who was the Guardianship Case Manager for the Division of Aging Services of Georgia's Department of Human Services ("DHS"), which was S.F.'s legal guardian, change S.F.'s RSP. At the time of the request, DBHDD policy prohibited a HHP from terminating its contract with a RSP, such as SRC, and then continuing to serve the individual who had been in the care of the HHP. Consequently, at S.F.'s behest and believing it to be in S.F.'s best interests, the case manager requested a waiver of such...