I was doing contract work for a company for many years and their lawyer sent me a letter on Monday to terminate my

Hello! My name is Debra (formerly known as Legal Ease). Thank you for your question. I'm reviewing it now, and will post back again shortly.

I am sorry to hear of this difficult situation.

What province are you in please?

Are you saying that you did not solicit this customer and you are not prohibited from competing with them as nothing to that effect was every signed by you?

You do not have to listen to to this company and do what they say. They can terminate your service with them without a doubt but they cannot restrict you from competing.

They can restrict you from soliciting or from using confidential information you obtained during the course of your working with them but in this case that isn't what happened. You did not solicit at all and so there is nothing wrong with you working with this customer.

Do you see what I mean?

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No you cannot.

That is soliciting.

You are never permitted to solicit.

If they contact you it is fine but you cannot contact them. You could be sued successfully.

Even though you were an independent contractor you cannot solicit their customers.

The customers can come to you so perhaps you can advertise and let the one customer they already came to you know they should pass your information on.

There is a number of ways the laws work in Canada. One of them is through legislation. Another is through contracts. Another is through common law. Common law is judge made law. It is how laws evolve when people sue.

Over the years the common law has created rules and one of them is that no one cannot unfairly compete and when someone solicit customers that they know about because they got to know about them through working for or with someone else that is said to be unfair competition. It would be similar to taking a mailing list and contact list from them.

So directly trying to entice their customers away from them after working for them is not going to work. You will be sued by them and it could be catastrophic.

You can advertise or word of mouth but you cannot solicit them.

Is there anything more I can help you with at this point in time?