1. The Supreme Court handed down its judgment in this case today; [2019] UKSC 32. It has not heralded quite the sea change in the law that some commentators had anticipated.
2. Ms Tillman had a contract that precluded her from being engaged, concerned or interested in a competing business (post termination), but omitted the conventional saving allowing her to hold a minority shareholding in a publicly quoted company. At first instance, the Judge (Mann J) held that properly construed, the restraint did not bite on a passive shareholding and made an injunction enforcing it. The Court of Appeal set aside the injunction, on the basis that the prohibition on being ‘interested in’ a competing business plainly extended to a passive shareholding and that part of the covenant could not be severed or blue-pencilled, applying Attwood –v- Lamont [1920] 3 KB 571 (severance of an apparently unitary covenants only possible where as a matter of grammer/construction it comprised two or more discrete restrictions).