Legal Question in Business Law in California

Re: work related

There is a fair amount of case law on this subject, and as I recall the weight of judicial opinion is that former employees have the right to notify their previous empoyer's customers regarding their new affiliation or business.

They can also go beyond this in some circumstances, to solicit actively for their business. However, this is a much greyer area. The peril is that information about customers and their needs may be, and often is, the former employer's trade secret.

There is no specific cooling off period, but certainly the passage of a lot of time would be a factor in whether information you took with you -- whether the secretary's Rolodex or in youe head -- is valuable and protected trade secret of commercial value and hence protected from misappropriation by the California version of the Uniform Trade Secrets Act, or merely public information available to anyone with a copy of the Yellow Pages or a search engine.