Lower court threw out entire employment contract. Appeals court said that went too far
A Georgia appeals court saved a confidentiality agreement a lower court threw out in Motorsports of Conyers v. Burbach, teaching HR a vital contract lesson.
When Edmund Burbach walked out of his job as chief operating officer at a group of Harley-Davidson dealerships in December 2019, he took a new position at a competing dealership just 20 miles away. His former employers were not pleased.
Burbach had signed employment agreements in 2016 with two of the dealerships, Motorsports of Conyers and Motorsports of Durham, operating as Falcons Fury Harley-Davidson and Raging Bull Harley-Davidson. Those contracts included three types of restrictions: a three-year ban on poaching employees or customers, a three-year ban on working for competitors within 120 miles, and restrictions on using confidential company information like customer lists and financial data.
The employers sued in August 2020, seeking to stop Burbach from working at his new job and enforce all three restrictions. What followed was years of legal ping-pong between trial and appeals courts, ultimately landing at the Georgia Supreme Court, which sent the case back down with instructions to apply Georgia's Restrictive Covenants Act.
When the trial court finally issued its ruling in February 2025, it delivered bad news for the employers. The judge found the agreements violated Georgia law and declared them completely unenforceable. Not just the non-compete provisions, but everything, including the confidentiality clause.
That sweeping decision turned out to be a mistake. On January 13, 2026, the Georgia Court of Appeals reversed course, and the reasoning matters for anyone who drafts employment contracts.
The appeals court noted that the fight over the three-year restrictions was now pointless. More than three years had passed since Burbach left in 2019, meaning those time-limited restrictions had expired. The litigation clock does not freeze those deadlines, the court explained, so there was nothing left to enforce on that front.
But here is where things get interesting for HR departments. The trial court had thrown out the entire employment agreements, including provisions about salary, job duties, and confidentiality. The appeals court said that went too far.
The agreements contained severability clauses, standard contract language stating that if one part fails, the rest remains valid. The appeals court said those clauses mattered. Just because the non-compete provisions might be problematic does not mean the whole contract collapses. Different sections can stand or fall independently.
More importantly, the court emphasized that confidentiality provisions play by different rules under Georgia law. While non-compete and non-solicitation agreements must meet tests for reasonable time limits and geographic scope, confidentiality restrictions face no such constraints. Georgia law explicitly allows companies to protect trade secrets and confidential information indefinitely and without geographic boundaries, as long as the information actually remains confidential.
The trial court never analyzed the confidentiality provision separately. It simply lumped everything together and tossed it all out based on problems with the three-year restrictions. The appeals court said that was wrong. Those confidentiality protections should remain enforceable.
The court also corrected another misunderstanding. The trial judge had said he could not modify the agreements because doing so would require rewriting them from scratch. But Georgia law specifically allows courts to sever problematic portions while keeping reasonable parts intact. That is not rewriting contracts; that is standard practice.
For HR professionals, this case underscores three practical points. Severability clauses are not just boilerplate. They serve a real purpose in protecting the parts of your employment agreements that work even when other parts fail. Second, confidentiality provisions deserve separate attention in drafting because they operate under different legal standards than competitive restrictions. And third, when litigation drags on for years, time-limited restrictions may expire before courts ever decide whether they were valid in the first place.
The employers won a partial victory, but it came more than five years after Burbach left and long after the competitive restrictions had any practical effect. The confidentiality protections survived, but the non-compete battle ended not with a legal ruling but simply because the calendar ran out.
