Courts in New York have long required non-competes and other post-employment restrictive covenants to be supported by adequate consideration in order to be enforceable. While this general rule leads many New York investment managers and their legal counsel to assume that employers must continue to pay former employees during a non-compete period, that assumption may be incorrect, as long as the restrictive covenant in question is otherwise reasonable and the employee was well compensated during his or her tenure. In a guest article, Pryor Cashman partner Jonathan Shepard and counsel Eric Dowell explain the circumstances under which New York courts will deem consideration to be adequate despite the absence of post-employment pay and provide practical advice on how to draft non-compete language that is likely to be held enforceable even where no payment is rendered during the non-compete period. See our two-part series on internal compensation arrangements for investment professionals: “Carried Interest and Deferred Compensation” (Mar. 15, 2018); and “Private Fund Compensation and Non-Competes” (Mar. 22, 2018).