Legal Advice

[roopurt18]

The company I work for develops software for a very specific sector.  It is a very small company, family owned and operated, and I constitute half of the entire programming staff.  We currently have two products.  One of them is a server based software that is about a decade old and is maintained by our other programmer.  The newer product is a web-based sister application to the server application which has about 3 years worth of development time; although only the past year of that time is by me.  When I started, ~90% of the web application didn't work for shit and they only had 3 clients using the web app.  I've since fixed a majority of the long-standing problems in addition to adding several new features and the client base is now just under 20.

 

Now I thoroughly enjoy my job and I think my coworkers are great people, all 6 of them.  However, I disagree strongly with much of the owner's business model.  Also, our main application (the server application), is problematic.  It's built on old technology, it's not user-friendly, it's expensive, etc.  I've tried time and time again to convince them about the best way to develop the web application (#1 on my list is breaking the dependency away from our clunky server application) to no avail.

 

Long story short I think I could singlehandedly do better but I'm financially unable to quit this job without finding a suitable replacement.  I'd rather not find a replacement job as it's a very relaxed office environment and only 5 minutes from my house.  So my question is, how legal would it be for me to continue working at this place and independently perform my own market research and develop a competing product?

 

P.S. I live in the U.S. and never signed any form of N.D.A. or document declaring I had no right to develop a competing product.  Further, I wouldn't be using any of the server application's source (I don't have access to it) or even my own source from the web application since the framework that was set up by the previous developer sucks IMO.

[AndyB]

So my question is, how legal would it be for me to continue working at this place and independently perform my own market research and develop a competing product?

 

If you want legal advice, get it from a lawyer - not just any lawyer though. Talk to someone who specialises in intellectual property law and who understands software as well.  Personally I think you would be on very thin ice indeed.  Whether you signed an NDA or not is likely not material, it just might make it a bit more difficult for your ex-employer to prove his inevitable claim for damages.