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Preliminary Injunction Enforces Non-Compete in Colorado, Where Non-Competes Are Presumptively Void

October 27, 2024
Business Litigation Reports

On September 5, 2024, a Denver District Court Judge granted Quinn Emanuel client Ingersoll Rand’s motion for preliminary injunction, barring the former CEO of an Ingersoll Rand subsidiary from working for competitor Avantor, Inc. for the duration of his non-compete.

            This case arose from Ingersoll Rand’s June 2024 acquisition of ILC Dover, a life sciences company, for $2.3 billion.  The purpose of the deal was to bolster Ingersoll Rand’s life sciences capabilities, and Ingersoll Rand intended that ILC Dover’s CEO, Corey Walker, would run the combined Ingersoll Rand-ILC Dover life sciences business after the acquisition.  To that end, Ingersoll Rand spent months prior to deal-closing providing Mr. Walker with its proprietary and confidential information that would allow him to run their combined post-acquisition life sciences business. 

            To Ingersoll Rand’s surprise, just two weeks after the deal closed, Mr. Walker abruptly resigned from Ingersoll Rand and announced that he was joining competitor Avantor as President of its $4.7 billion Laboratory Solutions business.  Ingersoll Rand knew it was critical to enforce the non-compete to protect its most valuable assets—the company’s confidential information and customer relationships.  Enter Quinn Emanuel.

            Within days, we filed for a temporary and restraining order in Colorado pursuant to Mr. Walker’s employment agreement’s venue clause.  We sought to enforce Mr. Walker’s non-compete, which stated, in pertinent part, that Mr. Walker would not be employed “in a Prohibited Capacity” by a business that competes with the part of the business of Ingersoll Rand in which Mr. Walker worked at any time during the last twelve months of his employment with Ingersoll Rand, which, for avoidance of doubt, included Avantor.  The facts and law were not entirely on our side, however, as Colorado law renders most non-competes presumptively void unless they fall into certain narrow exceptions.

            Despite these challenges, we obtained a temporary restraining order and, over the course of two months, litigated a full case, including document discovery, written discovery, discovery hearings, several depositions, and hundreds of pages of briefing.  At the preliminary injunction hearing, the Quinn Emanuel trial team put on four witnesses in one court day.

            Days later, the District Court found decisively for our client Ingersoll Rand, enforcing the non-compete and writing that Mr. Walker “did not wait for the ink to dry on his employment agreement with Ingersoll Rand before he started speaking to Avantor,” and while he was deep in negotiations to take a top role at a competitor, “he made no effort whatsoever to limit the amount of information he was exposed to.”  The District Court also noted that it found the testimony of the witnesses to be credible—except for Mr. Walker’s. 

            The case is Ingersoll Rand Inc., et al. v. Corey Walker, et al., No. 2024CV31985, in the Second Judicial District of Colorado.