Portability in Brussels is a professional rule before it is a compensation model. The Orde van Vlaamse Balies, in deontology advice 627, responding to a letter of 25 January 2019, says only a court, in a dispute, can rule on the validity of a non-compete and on how it sits with the client's free choice of lawyer. The advice treats that free choice as public order. It records Jo Stevens's reading, in Advocatuur. Regels & Deontologie (Kluwer, 2015), that the client's freedom cannot be signed away. It also records the contrary reading: the chosen lawyer may still refuse the file because of the clause, and that reading is easier to argue when a clientele was transferred for a price. The advice says the case law was then nonexistent. It does not declare every clause void, and it does not declare every clause enforceable.
The code of conduct of the Ordre des barreaux francophones et germanophone, in the French text in force on 1 September 2025, still does not write a partner non-compete of twelve months or of any other fixed length. Article 1.2 requires the lawyer to defend and advise the client in independence. Article 4.20 says the essential rules of the profession prevail over any contrary provision in the statutes or the partnership agreement, and that the bâtonnier may see those documents at any time. Article 4.31 says an organic correspondence between firms cannot impair the client's free choice. Article 4.27 says each party to an indefinite collaboration must not end it abruptly, absent a serious reason. None of those articles states a number of months for a partner.
Article 4.28, carried in the Moniteur belge of 17 January 2013, is the clause committees most often misread as a non-compete. It says the habitual collaborator of a lawyer may become counsel to a client of that lawyer only after a reasonable period following the end of the collaboration, unless the lawyer agrees, and that the collaborator must warn the former lawyer. A reasonable period is not a statutory three months and not a statutory twelve. The article is written for a collaborator, not as the exit rule for an equity partner in a company of lawyers. An equity partner's exit is the partnership agreement, read against article 4.20. Across the Brussels cohort of 250, the 44 partners who had a view on portability put the decision with the client.
Advice 705 of the Orde van Vlaamse Balies, the published PDF of which is labeled 211002 (2 October 2021), goes further for trainees. It says a non-compete in a pupillage agreement is hard to defend on deontological grounds, because free choice is public order and because the trainee is in a dependent position toward the pupil master. The advice points at the statute of 4 April 2019 on unfair terms between enterprises. It also says a court, not the bar, decides whether the clause is lawful. A partner search that includes stagiaires is therefore not covered by the partner's partnership agreement alone. The trainee instrument is article 3.9.
The employment non-compete is the instrument people import from a commercial contract, and it is the wrong one for an associé. The Federal Public Service Employment, on its page for the clause de non-concurrence, states the Act of 3 July 1978. At 1 January 2026 the clause is available only if annual gross pay exceeds EUR 44,447. Between EUR 44,447 and EUR 88,895 it is valid only if a collective agreement lists the function. Above EUR 88,895 it is valid unless a collective agreement excludes the function. It may not exceed 12 months. It may not run outside Belgium. The employer who does not waive it within 15 days of the end of the contract owes a single compensatory indemnity of at least half the worker's gross pay for the duration of the clause. If one condition fails, the clause fails. Those conditions attach to an employment contract. A Brussels partner who is an associé in a company of lawyers is not in that contract. The Court of Cassation, on 26 February 2021 (ECLI:BE:CASS:2021:ARR.20210226.1N.3), held that article II.3 of the Code of Economic Law of 28 February 2013 makes freedom of enterprise public order, and that a non-compete limited in time, space, and activity is not always disproportionate when the contract was wrongfully ended by the beneficiary of the clause. That judgment is not a lawyer case. It is the general test a drafter will cite. It does not replace advice 627.
The practical underwrite is therefore three documents, in this order. First, the roll: French-language, Dutch-language, List E, or more than one. Second, the partnership agreement or collaboration agreement, which the bâtonnier is entitled to see under article 4.20, checked for a notice period and for any clause that would force the partner to refuse a client who asks. Third, the client list, separated into relationships that follow the lawyer and matters that stay with the firm because the client instructed the firm. A clause that purports to lock the client is the clause advice 627 leaves to a judge. The wider covenant note, for other jurisdictions, is partner non-compete and garden leave by jurisdiction. It does not replace the Belgian instruments above.
