Survey Methodology
Employee restrictive covenants: counting methodology
The comparison matrix contains 91 filed agreements from 86 distinct SEC filers. Every compiled agreement and every evidence cell remains visible.
Raw agreement counts
Statements such as “N of M agreements include this provision” are unweighted. Each agreement counts once, including multiple agreements filed by the same company.
Company-weighted market statistics
Provision prevalence gives each normalized SEC CIK total weight 1 across that company’s compiled agreements. If one company has two compiled agreements, each agreement contributes 0.5 to the presence calculation; a company represented by one agreement contributes 1.
Typed-value distributions are conditioned on the field having a value. Each company that supplies at least one value contributes total weight 1 for that field, regardless of how many other filings omit it. Repeated filings with the same value do not add weight. When one company supplies different values, its single unit splits equally across those distinct values—for example, 0.5 to 12 months and 0.5 to 18 months. The survey does not blend them into an invented 15-month observation.
Scope and use
This is a U.S. nationwide drafting benchmark, not a jurisdiction-specific enforceability survey. A jurisdiction-specific template may use the distribution as market context, but its governing law and the parties’ facts still control enforceability. The observed terms are descriptive, not recommendations.
CIKs are parsed from official SEC EDGAR archive URLs and normalized without leading zeroes. Deferred forms are excluded from both denominators.