You have an idea for a tech startup and the software you’re developing is awesome. Founded along with a college buddy, the company grows quickly once you both graduate. You incorporate and secure an investor. You use some of the money to hire smart, ambitious, and talented staffers who are excited to be there and want to help the company reach its goals. You invest in them personally and financially, and believe you’re paying them well for startup standards. The word is getting out that you guys are becoming players in the field.

The future, and the potential to make a killing, is promising.

But then, one by one, your star employees leave for a job at another tech startup that you’ve heard is also working on software development. You are dumbfounded; you thought your staffers were happy. When pressed, each of them admits that while they loved working for you, the other startup approached them, asked them how much they made, what their stock options were and about their work environment. The competitor came back to them offering more money, free lunch, beer on Fridays and bigger stock options. Your employees didn’t want to leave you high and dry, but they felt like they couldn’t refuse the competitor’s proposal.

You and your business partner end up back where you started: on your own. The competitor’s business takes off, and your startup is at a standstill. You’re mad — and you’ve lost time and money.

The other startup may have committed what is known in California as tortious interference with business. Even though we live in a free market economy, and healthy competition is a good thing, the courts maintain that to be lawful, such actions must also be “fair.”

If you want to seek legal action against the competing startup, you, your business partner, and an attorney experienced in corporate law will have to prove that the competitor interfered with an economic relationship between you and your employees that would have resulted in an economic benefit to your company had it stayed away.

You and your lawyer also will have to prove the other startup knew about your relationship with your employees and intended to disrupt that relationship, and that the competitor engaged in wrongful conduct. And, you will have to show that in the end, the relationship with your employees was, in fact, disrupted and as a result your business suffered.