Stories by Marc Eisen

Writing about software giant Epic Systems in its hometown is always interesting and always a challenge. The company is famously reclusive, and its former employees, who are at the heart of the Madison area’s emerging health IT industry, are afraid to say anything that might offend the powerful tech company.

In this story for Isthmus, I tease out the controversy over Epic’s noncompete policy for those expats.

The Huron Consulting Group’s announcement in April that it was buying Vonlay, a 130-person Epic-specialty consulting company, set off alarms locally when it became known than Epic had successfully intervened at the 11th hour to insist that Huron not hire Epic employees within two years of them leaving the company.

The one-year separation that Vonlay leaders observed in their hiring would be doubled for the acquiring firm. It also seemingly meant that former Epic employees who had signed an employment contract with a one-year noncompete clause when they had started at Epic would now be subject to a two-year stipulation they hadn’t agreed to.

Huron and Vonlay officials did not respond to queries, but Epic spokesman Brian Spranger confirmed that Huron had agreed to a two-year noncompete term. And then the shocker: “This is being reverted to a one-year term.” Spranger offered no explanation in his email for the reversal. “We’d rather not comment on the policy as a whole.”

There is no shortage of speculation. Most of it circles around Epic fearing it might be treading on federal antitrust laws and being accused of anti-competitive business practices.

To read more, please go here.

This entry was posted on December 5, 2014 at 6:56 pm and is filed under Development, Tech, TheDailyPage.com/Isthmus. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: Epic Systems, Huron Consulting Group, Nordic Consulting, Sagacious Consulting, Shane Adams, Vonlay