I was unaware of the UK laws around this. That would take care of this pretty quickly even at the senior levels. If the company really believes that you have valuable knowledge, then the burden is on them (in terms of financial burden) to compensate you for not taking the other job.<p>Obviously, they would only do this in the cases where they are worried that it really could harm their competitive advantage. It would also save companies money in the long run given the number of instances that two companies go to court over things like this.