Pittsburgh Employment Lawyer for Software, AI, Cybersecurity and Technology Professionals

A technology career rests on two assets that an employment contract can quietly take away: the freedom to go work somewhere else, and the ownership of what you build. Many people do not read the paperwork that give those away. They sign an offer letter on a Friday, click through a confidentiality and invention assignment agreement on their first Monday, and do not think about it again until a recruiter calls or a cease-and-desist letter arrives.

We represent professionals in the tech industry - software engineers and architects, machine learning and AI researchers, data scientists and data engineers, security engineers, penetration testers, incident responders, CISOs, DevOps and platform engineers, product and engineering managers, VPs of Engineering, CTOs and technical founders. We represent people only, never the corporate employer, which means we are never conflicted out of taking your side.

Before You Sign: Offer Letters and Employment Agreements

The offer letter is the friendly document. It's intended to get you to join the team. The terms that decide your next five years live in the stack behind it: the confidentiality and invention assignment agreement, the equity plan and grant notice, the arbitration agreement, the relocation repayment addendum, the restrictive covenants and the handbook you are asked to acknowledge. We read the whole stack, tell you which terms are market and which are outliers, and give you the language to send back.

What we negotiate for technology professionals:

• Equity. The grant stated in shares and as a percentage on a fully diluted basis, with a strike price and 409A valuation behind it. The vesting schedule and cliff. Single-trigger versus double-trigger acceleration on a change of control. Early exercise and the 83(b) election window. Company repurchase rights and rights of first refusal. And the term almost nobody negotiates: the post-termination exercise window. A ninety-day default can make years of vested options worthless to someone who cannot write a six-figure check on ninety days' notice.
• Bonus and commission. How the metric is defined, who decides whether it was met, and whether you must still be employed on the payout date to be paid for work you already did.
• "Cause" and "Good Reason." These two definitions control whether a departure costs you everything or nothing. A termination two weeks before a vesting cliff is a contract claim, not bad luck - but only if the contract was written to make it one.
• Scope of confidentiality and invention assignment. This is where technology contracts are most aggressive and least negotiated.
• Restrictive covenants. Non-compete, customer and employee non-solicitation, no-hire, notice periods and garden leave.
• Arbitration and class waivers. Whether you can ever see a jury, who pays the arbitrator, whether fees shift, and whether the employer carved out an exception letting it run to court for an injunction while you stay in arbitration.
• Remote work, return-to-office and choice of law. A choice-of-law and forum clause can decide whether a covenant is void where you live or enforceable where the company is incorporated. For a remote employee this is often the single most important clause in the agreement.

Non-Competes and Your Right to Change Jobs

The Federal Trade Commission's 2024 rule banning most non-competes never took effect. It was set aside in federal court, the FTC dropped its appeals in September 2025, and the rule was formally removed from the Code of Federal Regulations in 2026. Non-competes are once again governed by state law, and in Pennsylvania that means the common law.

A Pennsylvania non-compete is enforceable only if it is (1) ancillary to the employment relationship or another legitimate transaction, (2) supported by adequate consideration, and (3) reasonably limited in duration, geography and scope to protect a legitimate business interest. Each of those is a fight.

• Consideration. A non-compete signed when you were hired is supported by the job itself. One handed to you two years in is not unless you got something new and real in exchange. Pennsylvania's Supreme Court has held that boilerplate reciting that the parties "intend to be legally bound" does not substitute for that consideration.
• Reasonableness. A worldwide, industry-wide, two-year restriction on a back-end engineer is not tailored to any protectable interest. Pennsylvania courts have equitable power to narrow an overbroad covenant rather than enforce it as written. This cuts both ways, and is a reason to negotiate the language rather than gamble on a judge rewriting it later.
• Non-solicits and no-hires. Often broader in practice than the non-compete itself. A clause barring you from "indirectly" soliciting can be read to reach a LinkedIn post announcing your new job.
• Choice of law. Your employer's counsel picked the governing state for a reason. Whether that choice sticks is litigable, and it should be evaluated before you resign, not after you are served.

We assess your exposure before you give notice, negotiate covenants at hire and at exit, respond to cease-and-desist letters, defend injunction and temporary restraining order proceedings, and where possible obtain a written release so your next employer is not scared off.

Who Owns What You Build: Invention Assignment and Open Source

Nearly every technology employment agreement contains a pre-invention assignment clause, and most are written far more broadly than the job requires. Language that sweeps in anything "relating to" the company's business or its "anticipated research and development" can reach a side project built on your own hardware, on your own time, with none of the company's data.

Pennsylvania is not one of the states — California, Delaware, Illinois, Kansas, Minnesota and Washington among them — that limit pre-invention assignment by statute. In Pennsylvania, the contract language largely controls. That makes negotiating the clause, and properly listing your prior inventions on the schedule the agreement asks for, more important, not less.

Issues we handle:

• Narrowing assignment language to work actually performed for the employer, using its resources.
• Prior inventions schedules — the exhibit almost everyone leaves blank, and the one that later decides who owns your side project.
• Outside activity and moonlighting clauses, consulting, advisory roles and board seats.
• Open source contribution policies, contributor license agreements, and personal repositories.
• Patent applications, inventorship, and whether you are named.
• Publication, conference talks, blogging and speaking approval rights - your professional reputation is an asset, and a gag clause depreciates it.

Trade Secrets and Leaving for a Competitor

Trade secret litigation under the federal Defend Trade Secrets Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1836, and the Pennsylvania Uniform Trade Secrets Act, 12 Pa.C.S. § 5301 et seq., is now the standard employer response to a departure - often filed alongside, or instead of, a non-compete claim. The claim rarely turns on what you knew. It turns on what the forensics show you touched.

What gets people sued is almost always mechanical: syncing a work folder to personal cloud storage, forwarding documents to a personal email account "to work on this weekend," plugging in a USB drive during the final two weeks, keeping a company laptop or phone after the last day, downloading a customer list or a repository. Talk to a lawyer before you resign, not after the exit-interview forensics report lands.

You should also know about a protection most employees are never told about. Under 18 U.S.C. § 1833(b), you cannot be held criminally or civilly liable under trade secret law for confidentially disclosing a trade secret to a government official, or to your attorney, for the purpose of reporting or investigating a suspected violation of law. Employers are required to give notice of that immunity in agreements governing trade secrets, and an employer that fails to do so cannot recover exemplary damages or attorney's fees against you. Check your agreement. Many still do not contain it.

AI Professionals: Issues Your Contract Probably Does Not Address

AI work has outrun the contract templates. Agreements drafted for conventional software development frequently do not say who owns a fine-tune, a set of model weights, a prompt library, an evaluation harness, a synthetic dataset, or the research you would publish. Silence is not neutral. It gets resolved later by whoever has more leverage.

• Ownership and publication. Model artifacts, training and evaluation data, research papers, and open-weight releases. If you were hired to do research, the right to publish it should be in writing.
• NDAs that reach safety concerns. Confidentiality and non-disparagement provisions - and separation agreements that condition vested equity on silence - have drawn serious regulatory attention. The SEC has treated confidentiality language that impedes reporting to a government agency as unlawful. Any agreement you sign should contain an express carve-out preserving your right to communicate with government agencies.
• Retaliation for raising concerns. If you flagged a model's accuracy, safety, security or bias problems, or objected to how a capability was represented to customers, investors or a regulator, and the employer treated you differently afterward, you may have a retaliation claim - under Sarbanes-Oxley if the employer is publicly traded, under the Dodd-Frank Act, under the False Claims Act if federal contract or grant money is involved, under Pennsylvania's Whistleblower Law, and even under the federal and state anti-discrimination laws that protect you against retaliation for opposing various unlawful employment practices. Those statutes have short and unforgiving deadlines, and the record you need is usually created in the first week.
• Use-of-AI clauses. New policies governing your use of AI tools cut in both directions: they create discipline exposure, and they create an audit trail that can prove what you actually did.

Cybersecurity Professionals and CISOs

Security leadership carries personal exposure that no other role in the company carries. The protections you want are cheap to obtain at hire and nearly impossible to obtain during an incident.

• Indemnification, advancement of fees and D&O coverage. Get an indemnification agreement in writing. Confirm the D&O policy actually covers your role, that fees are advanced rather than reimbursed, and that you have the right to independent counsel when the company's interests and yours diverge - which, in a breach, they will.
• Authority matched to accountability. You should not be accountable for a control you do not own or a budget you cannot approve. Put the reporting line, the escalation path and the sign-off authority in the agreement.
• Authorized access and the CFAA. The Supreme Court narrowed "exceeds authorized access" under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in Van Buren v. United States, 593 U.S. 374 (2021), and the Department of Justice's charging policy declines prosecution of good-faith security research. But your employer's written policies still define your authorization. Get testing, tooling, research and disclosure permissions documented in advance.
• Bug bounty, outside research and responsible disclosure. Moonlighting clauses and invention assignment language routinely conflict with independent research. They can be carved out.
• Being made the scapegoat. A termination timed to a disclosure obligation, a regulatory filing, an audit finding or an internal report you made is not a coincidence, and the timeline is evidence.
• Clearances and background investigations for defense, intelligence and government contract work, and the employment consequences of an adverse action.

Severance and Separation Agreements

A separation agreement is an offer, not a verdict. It is presented as a form because presenting it as a form discourages negotiation. Almost every term in it is negotiable. The terms that matter most to technology employees typically are:

• Severance amount and the payment schedule.
• Equity: accelerated vesting and an extended post-termination exercise window. For many engineers this is worth more than the cash severance.
• Earned but unpaid bonus and commission.
• Continued health coverage and the cost of COBRA.
• Release or narrowing of the non-compete and non-solicit - ask for it in writing.
• Mutual non-disparagement and agreed reference language.
• Carve-outs from the release: vested equity, indemnification, unemployment compensation, workers' compensation, and your right to report to a government agency.
• If you are 40 or older, the review period the Older Workers Benefit Protection Act requires - 21 days individually, 45 days in a group layoff, with 7 days to revoke after signing.

Do not sign it the day it is handed to you. The deadline in the document is your employer's deadline, and it is frequently extended when a lawyer asks.

Discrimination, Retaliation and Whistleblower Claims in Technology

Technology has its own recognizable patterns: the reorganization that lands hardest on the oldest engineers on the team; the "not a culture fit" that follows a complaint; the performance improvement plan that appears within days of a medical leave request or a return from leave; the woman or the person of color stack-ranked below peers doing the same work on the same codebase.

We litigate those cases. If your issue is a claim rather than a contract, start here:

• Age Discrimination
• Gender Discrimination
• Race Discrimination
• Disability Discrimination
• Pregnancy Discrimination
• Family and Medical Leave (FMLA)
• Sexual Harassment
• Workplace Retaliation
• Whistleblower and False Claims Act
• Executive Contracts and Compensation

Pittsburgh Is a Technology Hub

Pittsburgh's economy runs on robotics and autonomous systems, artificial intelligence research spun out of its universities, health system informatics, financial services technology, cloud and AI research offices, defense and government contractors, and a deep bench of startups. We know these employers, their standard paperwork and how they behave when someone leaves.

We also represent people who work remotely from the Pittsburgh area for employers headquartered elsewhere, and Pennsylvania residents whose agreements are governed by another state's law. Where you sit and whose law applies are two different questions, and both matter.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is my non-compete enforceable in Pennsylvania?

It depends on when you signed it, what you received in exchange, and how broadly it is written. Pennsylvania enforces non-competes that are ancillary to employment, supported by adequate consideration, and reasonably limited in time, geography and scope. A non-compete signed after you were already working, without a raise, promotion or other new benefit, is vulnerable. So is one that bars you from an entire industry nationwide. There is no such thing as an automatically valid or automatically void non-compete in Pennsylvania. It is a fact-specific analysis, and it should be performed before you resign.

My employer says it owns the app I built on my own time. Is that right?

Possibly, depending on the language of your invention assignment agreement and whether the project relates to the employer's business or anticipated research. Pennsylvania has no statute limiting these clauses, so the contract governs. If you have a side project, the time to address it is when you are hired by narrowing the clause and by listing the project on the prior inventions schedule.

Can I take my own code, notes or portfolio with me when I leave?

Assume the answer is no unless your agreement says otherwise in writing, and assume your employer will run forensics on your devices and accounts. Even code you personally wrote is generally the employer's work product. Copying it is what turns an ordinary resignation into a trade secret lawsuit. If you need a portfolio or a work sample, negotiate for permission rather than taking it.

What happens to my stock options if I am laid off?

Unvested options and RSUs are usually forfeited. Vested options typically must be exercised within a short window - often ninety days - or they expire, and for private-company options that can mean paying the strike price and a tax bill on paper gains for stock you cannot sell. Both accelerated vesting and an extended exercise window are negotiable, at hire and again at separation. If there is evidence that you were let go for reasons that violate the law, one of your remedies is to seek restoration to your ex ante position, such that even if the 90-day window expired, you argue that the clock never began to run because the lay-off was unlawful. 

Should I sign the severance agreement I was given?

Not before a Pittsburgh employment lawyer reads it. You are being asked to release every claim you have, usually for a number chosen before anyone evaluated those claims. Have it reviewed. If you are 40 or older, federal law already gives you at least 21 days to consider it and 7 days to revoke after signing.

Can I be fired for raising an AI safety or security concern?

Employers do it, but doing it can be unlawful. Depending on what you reported and to whom, you may be protected by Sarbanes-Oxley, the Dodd-Frank Act, the False Claims Act, the Pennsylvania Whistleblower Law, and other federal and state laws. Remember, those statutes have short and unforgiving deadlines to take action so do not wait to find out which one applies.

Do I need a lawyer to negotiate a job offer if I am not an executive?

Individual contributors have more leverage than they think, and the terms that constrain a senior engineer - invention assignment, non-compete, arbitration, equity mechanics - are the same ones that constrain a vice president. The cost of a review before you sign is a small fraction of what it costs to litigate the same clause three years later.

I work remotely from Pittsburgh for a company on the West Coast. Whose law applies?

That is exactly the fight. Your agreement almost certainly designates a governing state and a forum, and that designation is not always the last word. Pennsylvania courts will not always apply another state's law, and other states will not always enforce a Pennsylvania covenant. Because California, for example, voids most non-competes outright, the choice-of-law clause can be worth more than every other term combined.

Talk to a Pittsburgh Technology Employment Lawyer

Whether you are reviewing an offer, weighing a move that a non-compete may block, watching your employer respond badly to something you reported, or holding a severance agreement with a deadline on it, the earlier you call, the more options you have.

Call 412-258-2250 or email CAL@LAMBERTONLAW.COM to schedule a confidential consultation.