Once again, Mike Maslanka writes a nice post, summarizing a complicated area of law.  See his post summarizing the law on non-competes.  Look at his summary near the end.  You can successfully attack a non-compete agreement on various theories: 1) the information provided to the employee was not truly confidential, 2) the confidential information was provided too late to be of any real benefit to the employee and it could not serve as consideration, 3) and the usual: the non-compete was too broad in geographical location or length of the agreement.