Your “employer” was never your employer, but that’s beside the point. Without knowing the terms of the contract, I can’t really help you. If the contract explicitly stated that you were not permitted to contact any of the salon’s clients, and you contacted them, you are definitely in violation of that agreement, whether or not the message could be considered soliciting.

There’s likely very little that can be done to prevent or punish you, but I’d recommend having your clients follow your professional pages on social media, rather than soliciting them outright. Like I said, there’s likely not much to be done, but that doesn’t mean your current employer won’t try to take action citing your fiduciary duty of loyalty.

It depends on whether or not you have signed a contract. If you’re with one of the national chains, one of the terms of your employment likely did include a non-solicitation agreement. It wouldn’t be unlawful to thank them, but it would be to give them contact information (since that’s certainly considered solicitation).

They’d have to put it in their contracts, and a lot of salon owners do. Their non-solicitation clauses and employee handbook terms prohibit social media friendships/contact. However, if the employee chooses to create an online portfolio and that client seeks out that portfolio, then finds where the employee works after separation, that’s not considered solicitation since the client had to seek that information themselves.

Whether or not a salon owner would be successful in using the Uniform Trade Secrets Act is debatable. Personally, I think it’s open and shut. However, personal experience has shown that judges either don’t care or prefer competitive business practices. Then again, the majority of the small claims cases I’ve seen this occur in usually involve owners who have been doing a lot of shit wrong, so they didn’t have the moral or legal high ground.

42 states have adopted some form of a statute called the “Uniform Trade Secrets Act.” If your state has adopted a version of this act, then you’re prohibited from stealing your employer’s “trade secrets” and using them for your own benefit, even without a written agreement with the employer.

In most states, a firm’s client list would be considered a “trade secret” unless its content can be “readily obtained through some independent source.” So if you download the firm’s entire client list onto a computer diskette or CD and then send a letter to everyone on that list announcing the opening of your new firm, your old firm will almost certainly view that as a theft of its “trade secrets” and will sue you for that.

I’m curious about is this example. You leave a salon. The client follows. They can go anywhere they want. But if you added them on Facebook but didn’t solicit their business. Does the old salon have legal grounds to take you to court. Would love to see some court cases that really solve the aspect of employee leaves and didn’t take client information. So they are not violating any trade secrets. I’m guess the issue is did you sign a contract preventing you from friending them on social media or trading phone numbers. How can a business legally prevent employees from friending clients?