In the soup

David McNaughton is a quantity surveyor and project manager whose popularity and ambition landed him in court when he left his job. His boss at the design and engineering practice John Allen Associates didn't want to lose his first-rate employee, but, hey, that's life. Snag is, some of the firms clients didn't want to lose him either. Simons Estates was one such client; it wanted to go wherever McNaughton went. Simons had a 20-year working relationship with John Allen. It had dealt with McNaughton for 10 years. So what would happen if some of the projects now simmering came to the boil?

Simons and John Allen Associates frequently arranged a no-duck-no-dinner deal. The engineer and QS at John Allen would do the basic design on spec, then Simons would beaver away to pull it off. So when McNaughton said he was leaving for pastures new in October, he told his boss that the Simons account wanted to come with him. Then, a couple of months later, one of the speculative jobs came off. It was worth a cool £11m. McNaughton celebrated with a champagne lunch, even inviting John Allen, his ex-boss, to come along. The duck had, so to speak, come home to roost. In fact, the lunch ended up in a huge row. John Allen whispered in McNaughton's ear about the fees now due to his practice in the divvy up. The reaction caused the ex-boss to leave the party. He said he thought he was now entitled to £60-70,000 in fees. McNaughton offered him £10,000 for his trouble or nothing since he was owed nothing.

John Allen sued. By now it was a year or so since McNaughton had left. He had set up a limited company for project managing. He said it was his company that should be sued. No, no, said John Allen's lawyers, you took the account away personally and must be personally liable for the fees payable to John Allen for the pleasure of having taken away the customer.

It goes down ever so badly when the employer suspects that its ambitious offspring has ‘nicked’ some of his customers

Apparently, McNaughton and Allen had jointly written to Simons saying that the new project management consultant of McNaughton would be "to the benefit of us both". The firm's notice board announced that David McNaughton would now "be seen as a client and as our external project management team". It is not clear that that's the way McNaughton saw things. He must have given them the impression that he was starting on his own, but whether he intended some beneficial joint relationship isn't clear. It would make sense if that's what was intended. The £11m job wasn't yet in the bag when he left, and if it hadn't come off, John Allen could still have kept McNaughton's new venture busy.

It never surprises anyone when someone decides to break away from his or her employer and go it alone. Most people wish the acorn adventurer well. But it goes down ever so badly when the employer suspects that its ambitious offspring has "nicked" some of his customers. But you can't blame the major developer here for insisting that this first-class QS project manager get the work. That's not "nicking". On the other hand, as the judge pointed out, the work done on spec by John Allen Associates was an asset of that company. That asset would mature when the job got planning permission and began construction. Its free input now produced a contract worth damn near £200,000 in fees. McNaughton had walked away with that contract and it was property belonging to another. True, John Allen couldn't actually stop him dealing with the property. Nevertheless, he had to account for it just as though he had taken away, with permission, the firm's carpets and curtains. My suspicion is that McNaughton believed that since Simons wanted him, he was taking nothing from his old firm. But what the judge discovered is that John Allen had done nothing to persuade Simons to stick with it. Instead, it had happily done a deal with McNaughton. It was an oral contract whereby McNaughton would fairly divide up the fees for those previous John Allen jobs that he took over and had developed into live projects.