Step 4: Review

Act for each employer or client as faithful agents or trustees.

Engineers shall not falsify their qualifications or permit misrepresentation of their or their associates' qualifications. They shall not misrepresent or exaggerate their responsibility in or for the subject matter of prior assignments. Brochures or other presentations incident to the solicitation of employment shall not misrepresent pertinent facts concerning employers, employees, associates, joint venturers, or past accomplishments.

Engineers shall avoid the use of statements containing a material misrepresentation of fact or omitting a material fact.

Engineers shall not, without the consent of all interested parties, promote or arrange for new employment or practice in connection with a specific project for which the engineer has gained particular and specialized knowledge.

Engineers shall not attempt to injure, maliciously or falsely, directly or indirectly, the professional reputation, prospects, practice, or employment of other engineers. Engineers who believe others are guilty of unethical or illegal practice shall present such information to the proper authority for action.

The Board cited this case to establish that engineers who leave a firm may generally seek work from former clients, but not using particular knowledge gained while employed. It was also distinguished because in the current case Engineer A contacted current (not former) clients while still employed.

It was unethical for Engineer A to notify clients of Engineer B that Engineer A was planning to start a firm and would appreciate being considered for work while still in the employ of Engineer B.

It was not unethical for Engineer B to distribute a previously printed brochure listing Engineer A as a key employee provided Engineer B apprised the prospective client during the negotiation of Engineer A's pending termination.

It was unethical for Engineer B to distribute a brochure listing Engineer A as a key employee after Engineer A's actual termination.

Beyond the Board's finding that Engineer A's solicitation was unethical, Engineer A compounded the violation by failing to disclose to Engineer B that such solicitation was actively underway during the notice period. The faithful agent duty encompasses not merely the obligation to refrain from adverse competitive acts but also an affirmative duty of transparency toward the employer during the continuation of the employment relationship. By soliciting Engineer B's current clients covertly - without informing Engineer B - Engineer A deprived Engineer B of the opportunity to take protective measures, reassign client relationships, or accelerate the transition timeline. This non-disclosure constitutes an independent breach of the faithful agent and trustee obligation under Section I.4, separate from and in addition to the solicitation itself. The Board's conclusion focused on the act of solicitation but did not address whether the covert character of that solicitation independently aggravated the ethical violation. It did: the combination of active solicitation and deliberate concealment from the employer represents a more serious departure from professional loyalty than either element alone.

The Board's conclusion that Engineer A's solicitation was unethical does not adequately account for the asymmetry introduced by the employer-initiated nature of the termination. When Engineer B chose to terminate Engineer A for lack of work - a business decision made unilaterally by Engineer B - Engineer B effectively signaled that the employment relationship was no longer mutually beneficial and that Engineer A's continued loyalty would yield no reciprocal security. While the at-will employment symmetry principle invoked by Engineer A cannot serve as a blanket ethical license to solicit current clients during the notice period, it does carry moral weight as a mitigating factor in assessing the severity of the violation. The Board should have distinguished between cases where an employee voluntarily resigns to compete and cases where an employer initiates termination: in the latter scenario, the employee's pre-departure competitive positioning, while still ethically constrained by the faithful agent duty, is less culpable because the employee is responding to an involuntary displacement rather than opportunistically exploiting the employer's trust. The Board's failure to draw this distinction leaves the ethical standard underspecified for a common and practically important category of departure.

Engineer A's use of client relationships and project-specific knowledge acquired exclusively through employment with Engineer B to identify and target those specific clients for solicitation constitutes an independent ethical dimension that the Board did not separately address. Even if one were to accept the at-will employment symmetry argument as partially mitigating the solicitation's impropriety, the use of insider knowledge - including awareness of which clients had ongoing needs, pending projects, and existing dissatisfactions - to gain a competitive advantage over Engineer B goes beyond mere professional mobility. Section III.4.a requires consent of all interested parties before promoting new employment arrangements using information obtained in a professional capacity, and the specialized knowledge Engineer A possessed about Engineer B's clients was obtained solely in that capacity. The Board's analysis treated the solicitation as a unitary act, but the ethical analysis should have bifurcated it: the decision to solicit is one question, and the use of confidential client intelligence to execute that solicitation is a separate and potentially more serious question. Post-departure solicitation of former clients using generally known contact information may be permissible; pre-departure solicitation using privileged insider knowledge of client needs and vulnerabilities is not, and the Board should have articulated this distinction explicitly.

The Board's conditional permissibility ruling on Engineer B's notice-period brochure distribution - permissible only if Engineer B orally disclosed Engineer A's pending termination during active negotiations - sets a standard that is both underprotective of prospective clients and inconsistent with the proactive marketing material accuracy obligation that the Board itself recognized in other contexts. Oral disclosure during negotiations is inherently unreliable: it depends on the negotiating engineer's memory, candor, and judgment about when the disclosure is 'pertinent,' and it leaves no documentary record that the disclosure was made. A prospective client who receives a brochure listing Engineer A as a key employee and then hears a verbal qualification during a meeting may not fully appreciate the significance of that qualification, particularly if the brochure is left behind as a reference document. The Board should have required, at minimum, that Engineer B accompany each brochure distribution with a written addendum or errata sheet disclosing Engineer A's pending departure, rather than accepting oral disclosure as sufficient. The errata sheet mechanism is low-cost, creates a verifiable record, and ensures that the written document the client retains accurately reflects the firm's actual personnel situation. The Board's failure to require written correction during the notice period creates an internal inconsistency: it holds Engineer B to an absolute prohibition after actual termination but accepts a merely verbal correction standard during the notice period, even though the misrepresentation risk to prospective clients is substantially similar in both phases.

The Board's conditional permissibility ruling implicitly treats the notice period as a morally neutral interval during which Engineer B's business interests in using existing marketing materials are balanced against prospective clients' interests in accurate information. However, from a virtue ethics perspective, a firm principal who knowingly distributes a brochure listing a departing employee as a 'key employee' - even with oral qualification - is not demonstrating the professional virtue of honesty but rather managing a misrepresentation at the minimum acceptable threshold. The character standard expected of a firm principal goes beyond technical compliance with a disclosure requirement: it demands that the principal take affirmative steps to ensure that the overall impression conveyed to prospective clients is accurate. A brochure listing Engineer A as a key employee, combined with a verbal note that Engineer A 'may be leaving,' does not convey an accurate overall impression - it conveys a firm with a key employee who has some uncertainty about tenure, which is materially different from a firm that has already issued a termination notice to that employee. The Board's conditional permissibility ruling is legally defensible as a minimum ethical floor but does not represent the full character standard the profession should aspire to.

The Board's absolute prohibition on post-termination brochure distribution listing Engineer A as a key employee is well-founded, but the Board did not address whether Engineer A bears any independent ethical responsibility for the misrepresentation that Engineer B's continued brochure use perpetuates. Once Engineer A's actual termination occurred, Engineer A's professional identity and credentials were being actively misrepresented to prospective clients without Engineer A's consent and potentially to Engineer A's competitive detriment - prospective clients might assume Engineer A remained affiliated with Engineer B's firm and decline to engage Engineer A's new firm. Under Section II.5.a, engineers shall not permit misrepresentation of their qualifications or associations. This provision imposes an affirmative obligation on Engineer A to take steps to correct the misrepresentation once Engineer A became aware that Engineer B was continuing to distribute brochures listing Engineer A as a key employee. Engineer A should have formally notified Engineer B in writing to cease using the brochure and, if Engineer B failed to comply, should have considered notifying affected prospective clients directly. The Board's analysis focused entirely on Engineer B's obligation to correct the brochure but left Engineer A's reciprocal obligation to protect the accuracy of Engineer A's own professional representations unaddressed.

The Board's absolute prohibition on post-termination brochure distribution raises but does not resolve the question of whether the prohibition's force depends on the materiality of the listed employee's role to prospective clients' contracting decisions. The Board's ruling was premised on Engineer A being listed as a 'key employee,' a designation that is inherently material to a prospective client evaluating whether to engage the firm. However, the Board did not articulate whether the same absolute prohibition would apply if Engineer A had been listed as a peripheral or non-key employee whose departure would be unlikely to influence a prospective client's decision. The dual-element misrepresentation test - requiring both a misrepresentation of pertinent fact and a purpose to deceive - suggests that the ethical severity of post-termination brochure use should scale with the materiality of the departed employee's listed role. A brochure listing a departed key employee as currently affiliated is a categorical misrepresentation of a fact that is directly relevant to client decision-making and therefore warrants absolute prohibition. A brochure listing a departed peripheral employee might constitute a technical inaccuracy without rising to the level of a pertinent misrepresentation, depending on the circumstances. The Board's failure to articulate this materiality threshold leaves the standard potentially over-inclusive in low-stakes cases and under-theorized in high-stakes ones.

In response to Q101: Engineer A's failure to disclose to Engineer B that Engineer A was actively soliciting Engineer B's current clients during the notice period constitutes an independent breach of the faithful agent duty, separate from and compounding the ethical violation of the solicitation itself. The duty to act as a faithful agent under Section I.4 is not merely a duty to refrain from harmful acts but also an affirmative duty of candor toward one's employer. By conducting covert solicitation without disclosure, Engineer A deprived Engineer B of the opportunity to take protective measures, accelerate the termination, or negotiate a transition arrangement. The concealment transforms what might otherwise be a borderline competitive act into a deliberate act of bad faith. Even if one were to argue that the solicitation itself occupied a gray area given the employer-initiated termination, the non-disclosure removes any ambiguity: Engineer A was simultaneously performing work for Engineer B while secretly redirecting Engineer B's client relationships to a competing venture, without Engineer B's knowledge or consent. This dual conduct - active employment combined with covert competitive solicitation - is precisely what Section III.4.a is designed to prohibit.

In response to Q102: The fact that Engineer B initiated the termination rather than Engineer A voluntarily resigning does not materially alter the ethical calculus governing Engineer A's pre-departure client solicitation, and the Board was correct not to establish a distinct standard for employer-initiated departures. While the at-will employment symmetry principle - the notion that because Engineer B could terminate Engineer A at will, Engineer A should be free to compete immediately upon receiving notice - has intuitive appeal, it conflates legal entitlement with ethical obligation. The faithful agent duty under Section I.4 is not contingent on the reason for departure; it persists throughout the employment relationship until actual termination. The ethical wrong in Engineer A's conduct is not the decision to compete but the timing and method: soliciting current clients while still drawing compensation and performing work for Engineer B. Engineer B's decision to terminate for lack of work, while perhaps morally relevant as context, does not suspend Engineer A's loyalty obligations during the notice period. To hold otherwise would create a perverse incentive structure in which any employee receiving a termination notice could immediately begin raiding the employer's client base with ethical impunity. The Board's uniform standard appropriately prioritizes the integrity of the employment relationship over the circumstances of its dissolution.

In response to Q103: Engineer A bears a secondary but real ethical obligation to proactively notify Engineer B's prospective clients that Engineer A's name appearing in Engineer B's brochure is misleading after Engineer A's actual termination. While the Board's third conclusion correctly places primary responsibility for the post-termination brochure misrepresentation on Engineer B, Engineer A is not ethically passive in this situation. Engineer A's professional identity and credentials are being used without consent to attract clients to a firm Engineer A no longer represents. This exploitation harms Engineer A's own professional reputation, potentially associates Engineer A with projects or commitments Engineer A cannot fulfill, and misleads clients who may rely on Engineer A's listed participation as a material factor in selecting Engineer B's firm. Section II.5.a prohibits permitting misrepresentation of one's qualifications or associations, and Engineer A's silence in the face of known misrepresentation arguably constitutes such permission by omission. Engineer A should therefore take affirmative steps - such as directly notifying prospective clients with whom Engineer A has contact, or formally demanding that Engineer B cease distribution - to prevent the continued exploitation of Engineer A's professional identity. Engineer A's failure to do so does not rise to the level of Engineer B's direct ethical violation but represents a meaningful gap in Engineer A's own professional conduct.

In response to Q104: Engineer A's use of specialized knowledge about Engineer B's clients - knowledge gained exclusively through employment - to target those specific clients for solicitation constitutes an independent ethical concern that the Board did not fully address as a discrete question. The Board acknowledged the specialized knowledge constraint in passing but treated it as a contextual factor rather than a separate violation. However, Section III.4.a requires consent of all interested parties before promoting new employment arrangements using information or relationships developed during current employment. When Engineer A leveraged insider knowledge of Engineer B's client roster, project needs, and relationship dynamics to craft targeted solicitations, Engineer A was using proprietary relational capital that belonged, in a professional sense, to Engineer B's firm. This is categorically different from a departing engineer who, after termination, happens to encounter a former client in the marketplace. The targeted, knowledge-driven nature of the solicitation - made possible only by Engineer A's privileged access - amplifies the ethical violation beyond mere timing. The Board should have addressed this as a separate question, because even if the timing of solicitation were deemed permissible in some hypothetical scenario, the method of leveraging insider client intelligence without consent would remain independently problematic.

In response to Q201: The tension between Client Autonomy in Engineering Service Provider Selection and the Faithful Agent Trustee Duty is real but ultimately resolvable in favor of the loyalty obligation during the active employment period. Client autonomy - the principle that clients have an absolute right to choose their engineer - is a genuine and important value in the NSPE ethical framework, and it is true that Engineer A's solicitation could be framed as merely informing clients of a choice they are entitled to make. However, this framing conflates the clients' right to choose with Engineer A's right to solicit during active employment. Client autonomy does not generate an affirmative obligation on Engineer A's part to inform clients of competitive alternatives while still employed by Engineer B; it merely prohibits Engineer B from contractually preventing clients from switching engineers. The faithful agent duty, by contrast, directly governs Engineer A's conduct during employment and prohibits using the employment relationship as a platform for competitive self-promotion at the employer's expense. After actual termination, the balance shifts: client autonomy then supports Engineer A's right to make the market aware of a new firm, and the loyalty obligation no longer applies. The Board's conclusion correctly reflects this temporal resolution of the tension.

In response to Q202: The At-Will Employment Symmetry principle cannot serve as an ethical justification for conduct that violates loyalty obligations, and the Board implicitly but correctly rejected this argument. The symmetry argument holds that because Engineer B could terminate Engineer A at will, Engineer A should be equally free to compete at will from the moment of receiving notice. This reasoning is flawed for two reasons. First, ethical obligations are not merely reciprocal legal entitlements; the faithful agent duty exists independently of whether the employment relationship is at-will. Second, the symmetry argument proves too much: if accepted, it would mean that any employee who receives a termination notice - or even anticipates one - could immediately begin soliciting the employer's clients, using the employer's resources, relationships, and time, without ethical constraint. The Questionable Competition Methods Prohibition under Section III.7 is precisely designed to prevent competitive conduct that, while perhaps not illegal, undermines the professional trust on which engineering practice depends. At-will reciprocity is a legal concept governing the termination of employment; it does not dissolve the ethical obligations that govern conduct during employment.

In response to Q203: The tension between the Notice-Period Brochure Distribution Conditional Permissibility principle and the Proactive Marketing Material Accuracy Obligation reveals a meaningful gap in the Board's second conclusion. The Board's conditional permissibility ruling - allowing Engineer B to continue distributing the brochure during the notice period provided oral disclosure of Engineer A's pending departure is made during active negotiations - relies on a disclosure mechanism that is inherently incomplete. Oral disclosure during negotiation reaches only those prospective clients who have already entered active discussions with Engineer B; it does not reach prospective clients who receive the brochure but have not yet initiated negotiations, nor does it create a documented record of the disclosure. The Proactive Marketing Material Accuracy Obligation, grounded in Sections III.3.a and II.5.a, would seem to require that the written record itself be corrected - through an errata sheet, written addendum, or updated brochure - rather than relying on case-by-case oral qualification. The Board's ruling is pragmatically lenient, acknowledging the logistical difficulty of immediately reprinting brochures, but it sets a lower standard than the proactive accuracy obligation would demand. A more rigorous application of the honesty principle would require Engineer B to issue written corrections accompanying each brochure distribution during the notice period, not merely verbal disclosures during negotiations.

In response to Q204: The temporal boundary between permissible and impermissible solicitation is indeed ethically unstable when the client relationships and project knowledge enabling post-departure solicitation were acquired exclusively during employment, and the Board's framework does not fully resolve this instability. The Former-Client Solicitation Permissibility principle holds that Engineer A may freely solicit Engineer B's former clients after departure, but this permissibility is premised on a clean temporal break that does not exist in practice. The very knowledge of which clients to contact, what their project needs are, and how to frame a competitive pitch was acquired during employment. The Specialized Knowledge Constraint acknowledges this problem but applies it only conditionally and without specifying how it interacts with the post-departure permissibility rule. A more coherent framework would distinguish between general professional knowledge of client relationships - which Engineer A legitimately carries as part of professional experience - and specific proprietary intelligence about ongoing projects, budgets, and decision-making processes, which should remain subject to a confidentiality constraint even after departure. The Board's binary temporal framework - prohibited before termination, permitted after - is administratively clear but ethically underinclusive, as it does not account for the qualitative nature of the knowledge being deployed in post-departure competition.

In response to Q301: From a deontological perspective, Engineer A violated a categorical duty of loyalty to Engineer B by soliciting Engineer B's current clients during the notice period, regardless of whether Engineer B initiated the termination and regardless of the absence of a written non-compete agreement. The Kantian categorical imperative requires that one act only according to maxims that could be universalized without contradiction. If every employee who received a termination notice immediately began soliciting the employer's current clients while still employed, the institution of employment - and the trust relationships on which it depends - would be systematically undermined. The faithful agent duty under Section I.4 is precisely such a categorical obligation: it does not admit of exceptions based on the circumstances of departure or the absence of contractual restrictions. The deontological analysis also highlights the wrongness of using the employer's own client relationships - relationships Engineer A accessed only by virtue of employment - as instruments for competitive self-promotion during the employment period. This instrumentalization of the employer's relational assets for Engineer A's benefit, without consent, violates the duty to treat the employer as an end in itself rather than merely as a means to Engineer A's career advancement.

In response to Q302: From a consequentialist perspective, Engineer A's pre-departure solicitation of Engineer B's clients produced net harm across affected parties that outweighed the competitive positioning benefit Engineer A gained. For Engineer B, the harm is direct and concrete: the goodwill embedded in client relationships - built through years of service and investment - was actively eroded by an employee still drawing compensation from the firm. For Engineer B's clients, the harm is subtler but real: clients who received Engineer A's solicitation while Engineer A was still employed by Engineer B were placed in an awkward position, potentially receiving incomplete or strategically framed information about Engineer A's departure circumstances, and were denied the benefit of a fully transparent competitive marketplace. For the engineering profession broadly, the harm is reputational: if departing engineers routinely solicit current employer clients during notice periods, the profession's trustworthiness as a whole is diminished, increasing transaction costs for all clients who must now be more guarded in sharing project information with engineers. Against these harms, the benefit to Engineer A - earlier competitive positioning - is modest and could have been achieved through ethically permissible means by waiting until after actual termination. The consequentialist calculus therefore supports the Board's finding of a violation.

In response to Q303: From a virtue ethics perspective, Engineer B did not fully demonstrate the professional virtue of honesty when distributing the brochure during the notice period without proactively disclosing Engineer A's pending termination, and the Board's conditional permissibility ruling captures only the minimum ethical threshold rather than the character standard expected of a firm principal. A person of genuine professional integrity - one who embodies honesty as a character trait rather than merely complying with disclosure rules when directly asked - would not distribute marketing materials known to contain a material inaccuracy without simultaneously and proactively correcting that inaccuracy in writing. The Board's ruling that oral disclosure during active negotiations is sufficient reflects a pragmatic accommodation of business realities, but it does not reflect the virtue of honesty as a positive character disposition. A firm principal who truly values transparency would recognize that prospective clients who receive the brochure but do not yet enter active negotiations are being misled, and would take steps - such as an errata sheet or written addendum - to prevent that misleading impression from forming. The conditional permissibility ruling is therefore better understood as establishing a floor of ethical compliance rather than a ceiling of professional virtue.

In response to Q304: From a deontological perspective, Engineer B's continued post-termination distribution of a brochure listing Engineer A as a key employee constitutes a categorical misrepresentation of fact that violates a duty of honesty owed simultaneously to prospective clients, to Engineer A, and to the engineering profession. The duty of honesty, as a categorical obligation, does not admit of exceptions based on logistical inconvenience or the cost of reprinting brochures. Engineer B's post-termination conduct involves three distinct deontological wrongs. First, prospective clients are deceived about the personnel composition of the firm they are considering hiring, a deception that directly affects their ability to make informed contracting decisions. Second, Engineer A's professional identity and credentials are being exploited without consent to attract business to a firm Engineer A no longer represents, violating Engineer A's right to control the use of Engineer A's own professional reputation. Third, the engineering profession's collective commitment to honest representation - embodied in Sections II.5.a and III.3.a - is undermined when a firm principal knowingly distributes inaccurate personnel information. The Board's absolute prohibition on post-termination brochure distribution is therefore not merely a pragmatic rule but a deontologically necessary conclusion: no competing consideration can justify the knowing misrepresentation of material facts to prospective clients.

In response to Q401: Engineer A's pre-departure solicitation of Engineer B's clients would have been substantially more defensible ethically - though not necessarily fully permissible - if Engineer A had first fully disclosed to Engineer B the intent to solicit those specific clients, obtained Engineer B's acknowledgment, and notified clients openly rather than covertly. Full prior disclosure to Engineer B would have satisfied the core of the faithful agent duty by eliminating the element of concealment and allowing Engineer B to make informed decisions about the notice period arrangement. Open notification to clients - as opposed to covert solicitation - would have respected the clients' right to make informed choices without the distortion created by Engineer A's insider position. However, even with these safeguards, a residual ethical concern would remain: Engineer A would still be using the employment relationship as a platform for competitive self-promotion, and Engineer B's clients would still be receiving competitive solicitations from someone who was simultaneously performing work on Engineer B's behalf. The most ethically clean resolution would have been for Engineer A to wait until after actual termination to solicit clients, even if that meant a competitive disadvantage. Full disclosure and open conduct would mitigate but not eliminate the ethical tension inherent in soliciting a current employer's clients during active employment.

In response to Q402: The Board's ethical assessment of Engineer A's solicitation conduct would not have differed materially if Engineer A had waited until after actual termination to contact Engineer B's former clients, and the timing of Engineer B's termination notice does not create a morally relevant asymmetry sufficient to shift the ethical balance in Engineer A's favor during the notice period. After actual termination, Engineer A would be entirely free to solicit former clients under the Former-Client Solicitation Permissibility principle, and no ethical violation would arise. The moral asymmetry argument - that Engineer B's decision to terminate Engineer A at will should accelerate Engineer A's competitive freedom - is appealing but ultimately unpersuasive for the reasons discussed in response to Q102. What the termination notice does create is a legitimate basis for Engineer A to begin internal planning for a new firm, to consult with legal counsel about non-compete obligations, and to prepare marketing materials - all without crossing into active solicitation of current clients. The ethical boundary is between preparation and solicitation, not between employer-initiated and employee-initiated departures. The Board's framework correctly maintains this boundary regardless of who initiated the departure.

In response to Q403: Engineer B's distribution of the brochure during the notice period would have been closer to unconditionally ethical - though still not entirely free of concern - if Engineer B had proactively issued a written errata sheet or addendum to all prospective clients at the time of each brochure distribution, rather than relying on oral disclosure only during active negotiations. Written correction at the point of distribution would satisfy the Proactive Marketing Material Accuracy Obligation more fully than oral disclosure, because it would reach all recipients of the brochure regardless of whether they entered active negotiations, it would create a documented record of the disclosure, and it would prevent the formation of a misleading impression in the minds of prospective clients who read the brochure but did not immediately contact Engineer B. The Board's conditional permissibility ruling is best understood as a pragmatic minimum: it acknowledges that immediate reprinting is not always feasible but does not endorse oral-only disclosure as the ideal standard. A written errata sheet is a low-cost mechanism that Engineer B could have deployed without significant burden, and its use would have more fully aligned Engineer B's conduct with the honesty and accuracy obligations embedded in Sections III.3.a and II.5.a. The Board's ruling leaves room for this higher standard without requiring it.

In response to Q404: Engineer B's post-termination brochure distribution would likely remain ethically impermissible even if Engineer A had been listed as a non-key, peripheral employee rather than a key employee, though the severity of the violation and its practical impact on prospective clients' contracting decisions would be diminished. The Board's absolute prohibition on post-termination brochure use is grounded in the categorical honesty obligation under Sections II.5.a and III.3.a, which prohibit misrepresentation of material facts regardless of the degree of materiality. However, the Pertinent Fact Dual-Element Test applied by the Board does incorporate a materiality assessment: a misrepresentation must be both false and pertinent to the client's decision-making to constitute a full ethical violation. For a non-key, peripheral employee, the pertinence element would be weaker - prospective clients are less likely to rely on the listed participation of a peripheral employee in making contracting decisions. This suggests that while the post-termination brochure distribution would remain technically impermissible as a false statement of fact, the ethical gravity of the violation would be calibrated to the materiality of the listed employee's role. The Board's absolute prohibition is therefore best understood as applying with full force to key employees whose listed participation is material to client decisions, while the same conduct involving peripheral employees, though still impermissible, would represent a less serious violation.

The Board resolved the tension between Client Autonomy in Engineering Service Provider Selection and the Faithful Agent Trustee Duty by treating them as operating on different temporal planes rather than as genuinely competing values. Client autonomy - the client's absolute right to choose their engineer - was acknowledged as a legitimate long-run principle, but the Board refused to allow it to serve as a real-time justification for Engineer A's solicitation conduct during the notice period. The Board's implicit reasoning is that client autonomy is a structural feature of the engineering marketplace that becomes operative after an employment relationship concludes, not a license that a currently employed engineer may invoke to justify redirecting a current employer's clients toward a competing venture. In other words, the principle of client autonomy does not dissolve the faithful agent duty; it merely defines the outer boundary of what the faithful agent duty can legitimately restrict once employment ends. This resolution teaches that client-protective principles and employer-protective principles are not symmetrically weighted: the faithful agent duty functions as a near-absolute constraint during active employment, while client autonomy functions as a permissive background norm that governs post-departure conduct.

The Board's treatment of the At-Will Employment Symmetry principle reveals a fundamental asymmetry in how reciprocal at-will rights are ethically weighted. Engineer A's implicit argument - that because Engineer B could terminate Engineer A at will, Engineer A was equally free to begin competing for Engineer B's clients immediately upon receiving notice - was implicitly rejected. The Board's conclusion establishes that at-will employment symmetry is a legal concept that describes the absence of contractual barriers to departure, not an ethical license that neutralizes the faithful agent duty during the notice period. The Questionable Competition Methods Prohibition operates independently of whether a non-compete agreement exists: the absence of a written restriction does not convert covert solicitation of a current employer's clients into ethically permissible conduct. This case therefore teaches that at-will reciprocity can never serve as a standalone ethical justification for conduct that violates loyalty obligations, because the faithful agent duty is grounded in professional ethics codes rather than in contract law. The ethical obligation persists even where the legal obligation does not.

The Board's conditional permissibility ruling on Engineer B's notice-period brochure distribution exposes an unresolved tension between the Notice-Period Brochure Distribution Conditional Permissibility principle and the Proactive Marketing Material Accuracy Obligation. By permitting Engineer B to continue distributing a brochure listing Engineer A as a key employee provided oral disclosure of Engineer A's pending departure was made during active negotiations, the Board implicitly accepted a lower standard of accuracy for printed marketing materials than the Proactive Marketing Material Accuracy Obligation would seem to demand. A fully proactive accuracy standard would require Engineer B to correct the written record - through an errata sheet or written addendum - rather than relying on case-by-case oral qualification. The Board's ruling thus creates a two-tier disclosure regime: oral disclosure suffices during the notice period, but the absolute prohibition on post-termination brochure use implies that the written record must eventually be corrected. This tension is never fully resolved by the Board, and the case teaches that where a proactive accuracy obligation and a conditional permissibility principle coexist, the Board will calibrate the required correction mechanism to the severity of the misrepresentation risk rather than imposing a uniform written-correction standard across all stages of the employment transition. The practical implication is that Engineer B bore a progressively escalating accuracy obligation: permissive with oral disclosure during negotiations, conditionally permissive during the notice period, and absolutely prohibited after actual termination - a graduated rather than binary ethical standard.

The interaction between the Former-Client Solicitation Permissibility principle and the Specialized Knowledge Constraint reveals that the Board treated the temporal boundary of employment as the primary ethical dividing line for competitive solicitation, while leaving the specialized knowledge problem structurally unresolved. The Board acknowledged that Engineer A would be free to solicit Engineer B's former clients after departure, and that no written non-compete agreement existed, but it also noted the risk that Engineer A might use specialized knowledge gained during employment to target those clients. Rather than establishing a clear rule about whether employment-acquired client knowledge taints post-departure solicitation, the Board effectively deferred that question by finding the pre-departure solicitation unethical on faithful agent grounds alone. This deferral means the case does not resolve whether the specialized knowledge constraint survives the termination of employment or whether it evaporates once the faithful agent duty ends. The case therefore teaches that when the Board can resolve an ethical question on narrower grounds - the timing of solicitation relative to employment status - it will avoid adjudicating the harder question of whether knowledge acquired during employment creates a permanent competitive disadvantage for the departing engineer. The temporal boundary is treated as a bright line precisely because the knowledge-taint question has no clean answer.

Taken together, the Board's three conclusions establish a graduated principle-prioritization hierarchy that operates across the full arc of the employment transition. During active employment - even under a notice of termination - the Faithful Agent Trustee Duty and the Questionable Competition Methods Prohibition are treated as near-absolute constraints that override both the At-Will Employment Symmetry principle and the Client Autonomy principle. During the notice period after termination notice but before actual termination, the Honesty Principle and the Proactive Marketing Material Accuracy Obligation are treated as satisfiable through oral disclosure during active negotiations, meaning the accuracy obligation is real but its discharge mechanism is flexible. After actual termination, the Honesty Principle and the Pertinent Fact Misrepresentation prohibition are treated as absolute, admitting no exceptions based on logistical difficulty or printing costs. This graduated hierarchy teaches that the NSPE Code does not apply principles uniformly across all phases of an employment relationship: the weight assigned to loyalty, honesty, and accuracy obligations shifts depending on whether the engineer is currently employed, in a notice period, or formally departed. The case thus functions as a temporal map of how competing principles are prioritized at each stage of a professional transition, with the faithful agent duty dominating during employment, a balanced disclosure standard governing the notice period, and an unqualified honesty obligation controlling post-departure conduct.

Was it ethical for Engineer A to notify clients of Engineer B that Engineer A was planning to start a firm and would appreciate being considered for future work while still in the employ of Engineer B?

Was it ethical for Engineer B to distribute a brochure listing Engineer A as a key employee in view of the fact that Engineer B had given Engineer A a notice of termination?

Was it ethical for Engineer B to distribute a brochure listing Engineer A as a key employee after Engineer A's actual termination?

Should Engineer A have disclosed to Engineer B that Engineer A was actively soliciting Engineer B's clients during the notice period, and does the failure to make that disclosure independently constitute a breach of the faithful agent duty regardless of whether the solicitation itself was ethical?

Does the fact that Engineer B initiated the termination rather than Engineer A resigning alter the ethical calculus for Engineer A's pre-departure client solicitation, and should the Board have established a distinct ethical standard for employer-initiated versus employee-initiated departures?

What obligation, if any, did Engineer A have to proactively notify Engineer B's prospective clients that Engineer A's name appearing in Engineer B's brochure was misleading after Engineer A's actual termination, and does Engineer A share ethical responsibility for the misrepresentation perpetuated by Engineer B's continued brochure use?

Did Engineer A's use of specialized knowledge about Engineer B's clients-gained exclusively through employment-to target those specific clients for solicitation constitute an independent ethical violation beyond the mere act of solicitation, and should the Board have addressed this as a separate question?

Does the principle of Client Autonomy in Engineering Service Provider Selection-which affirms clients' absolute right to choose their engineer-conflict with the Faithful Agent Trustee Duty owed to Engineer B, given that Engineer A's solicitation could be framed as merely informing clients of a choice they are entitled to make freely?

Does the At-Will Employment Symmetry principle-invoked to justify Engineer A's solicitation on the grounds that Engineer B could terminate Engineer A at will-conflict with the Questionable Competition Methods Prohibition, and can at-will reciprocity ever serve as an ethical justification for conduct that would otherwise violate loyalty obligations?

Does the Notice-Period Brochure Distribution Conditional Permissibility principle-which allows Engineer B to continue distributing the brochure provided oral disclosure is made-conflict with the Proactive Marketing Material Accuracy Obligation, which would seem to require correction of the written record rather than mere verbal qualification during negotiations?

Does the Former-Client Solicitation Permissibility principle-which would allow Engineer A to solicit Engineer B's clients after departure-conflict with the Specialized Knowledge Constraint, given that the very client relationships and project knowledge enabling post-departure solicitation were acquired exclusively during employment, making the temporal boundary between permissible and impermissible solicitation ethically unstable?

From a deontological perspective, did Engineer A violate a categorical duty of loyalty to Engineer B by soliciting Engineer B's current clients during the notice period, regardless of whether Engineer B had initiated the termination and regardless of whether no written non-compete agreement existed?

From a consequentialist perspective, did Engineer A's pre-departure solicitation of Engineer B's clients produce net harm across all affected parties - Engineer B's business goodwill, the clients' informed decision-making, and the broader engineering profession's trustworthiness - that outweighed any benefit Engineer A gained from early competitive positioning?

From a virtue ethics perspective, did Engineer B demonstrate the professional virtue of honesty when distributing a brochure listing Engineer A as a key employee during the notice period without proactively disclosing Engineer A's pending termination to prospective clients, and does the Board's conditional permissibility ruling adequately capture the character standard expected of a firm principal?

From a deontological perspective, does Engineer B's continued post-termination distribution of a brochure listing Engineer A as a key employee constitute a categorical misrepresentation of fact that violates a duty of honesty owed simultaneously to prospective clients, to Engineer A whose professional identity is being exploited without consent, and to the engineering profession at large?

Would Engineer A's pre-departure solicitation of Engineer B's clients have been ethically permissible if Engineer A had first fully disclosed to Engineer B the intent to solicit those specific clients, obtained Engineer B's acknowledgment, and notified the clients openly rather than covertly - thereby satisfying the faithful agent duty while still exercising competitive mobility rights?

Would the Board's ethical assessment of Engineer A's solicitation conduct have differed if Engineer A had waited until after actual termination to contact Engineer B's former clients, and does the timing of Engineer B's termination notice create a morally relevant asymmetry that should have shifted the ethical balance in Engineer A's favor?

Would Engineer B's distribution of the brochure during the notice period have been unconditionally ethical - rather than conditionally ethical - if Engineer B had proactively issued an errata sheet or written addendum to all prospective clients disclosing Engineer A's pending departure at the time of each brochure distribution, rather than relying on oral disclosure only during active negotiations?

Would Engineer B's post-termination brochure distribution have remained ethically impermissible even if Engineer A had been listed as a non-key, peripheral employee rather than a key employee, and does the Board's absolute prohibition on post-termination brochure use depend on the materiality of the listed employee's role to prospective clients' contracting decisions?

During the notice period, Engineer B's continued distribution of brochures listing Engineer A as a key employee conditionally satisfies marketing accuracy obligations only if accompanied by oral or written disclosure of Engineer A's pending departure to prospective clients in active negotiations, but violates the pertinent-fact misrepresentation standard and non-misleading obligations when no such disclosure is made.

Engineer A's decision whether to use proprietary project knowledge gained during employment to target specific clients for competitive solicitation is constrained by the requirement to first disclose such intended use to Engineer B, and using such knowledge without disclosure violates the faithful agent duty, the questionable competition methods prohibition, and the specialized knowledge disclosure obligation.

Engineer B's continued distribution of brochures naming Engineer A after Engineer A's actual termination constitutes an absolute ethical violation with no conditional permissibility, as it misrepresents firm personnel to prospective clients and cannot be excused by logistical difficulty, with the errata sheet mechanism available as a low-cost corrective remedy.

Engineer B's issuance of termination notice to Engineer A triggers the at-will employment symmetry principle that ethically permits Engineer A to begin soliciting clients for a competing practice during the notice period, while simultaneously activating heightened disclosure obligations on Engineer B regarding brochure accuracy and on Engineer A regarding faithful agent conduct boundaries.

Engineer A's solicitation of Engineer B's current clients while still employed during the notice period violates the faithful agent duty, the covert solicitation prohibition, and the questionable competition methods standard unless Engineer A first discloses the solicitation activity to Engineer B, while post-departure solicitation of those same clients becomes permissible absent a written non-compete agreement, distinguishing this case from BER Case 77-11.

This question arose because the termination notice created an ambiguous intermediate state in which Engineer A remained legally employed but had been constructively released from future employment, causing the data to simultaneously activate competing warrants about loyalty and mobility. The absence of a written non-compete agreement removed the clearest legal constraint, leaving the ethical boundary between permissible departure planning and impermissible competitive solicitation genuinely contested.

This question arose because the notice period created a factual gap between the brochure's printed content and Engineer B's actual knowledge of Engineer A's departure, activating competing warrants about whether the honesty obligation requires proactive correction of technically-current-but-misleading representations. The dual-element materiality test introduced by the Board's analysis meant that the ethical answer depended on context-specific facts about how the brochure was used, making a categorical answer impossible without further factual inquiry.

This question arose because the formal termination event eliminated the factual ambiguity that made Q2 contestable, yet Engineer B's continued use of the brochure persisted, forcing the question of whether the ethical violation was absolute from the moment of termination or graduated based on Engineer B's response time and corrective efforts. The availability of low-cost correction mechanisms like errata sheets made Engineer B's inaction harder to justify, sharpening the ethical question into one about the stringency and immediacy of the honesty obligation.

This question arose as a second-order inquiry generated by Q1's unresolved tension: even if the solicitation itself were deemed permissible, the question of whether Engineer A's silence about that solicitation constitutes an independent ethical violation emerged because the faithful-agent duty encompasses not just the acts themselves but the transparency with which an employee conducts activities that affect the employer's interests. The question isolates the disclosure dimension from the solicitation dimension, asking whether concealment compounds or independently constitutes the ethical breach.

This question arose because the Board's analysis in BER Case 82 did not explicitly address whether the employer-initiated nature of the termination modifies the ethical standard applicable to Engineer A's pre-departure conduct, leaving open a structural gap in the ethical framework that the at-will employment symmetry principle could fill. The question challenges the Board to determine whether the moral asymmetry created by involuntary termination should translate into a differentiated ethical standard, or whether the faithful-agent duty operates as a status-based obligation indifferent to the circumstances of departure initiation.

This question emerged because the Board's analysis assigned the brochure correction obligation exclusively to Engineer B under the Post-Actual-Termination Brochure Continued Use Absolute Prohibition, leaving unresolved whether Engineer A's passive silence about the misrepresentation constitutes independent ethical complicity. The data of continued brochure distribution after formal termination activates competing warrants-one anchored in Engineer B's distributional control and one in Engineer A's duty of honesty-whose boundary conditions were never explicitly adjudicated.

This question arose because the Board treated Engineer A's solicitation as a unified ethical violation under NSPE-Code-Section-III.7 without disaggregating whether the use of insider client knowledge constituted an independent breach of NSPE-Code-Section-III.4.a or NSPE-Code-Section-II.5.a. The data of Engineer A's exclusive knowledge access combined with targeted solicitation activates the Specialized Knowledge Employer Disclosure Before Competitive Use Obligation as a potentially separate warrant, whose independent force the Board's analysis left unaddressed.

This question emerged because the Board's tripartite balancing framework-Engineer A's mobility rights, Engineer B's goodwill interests, and clients' free choice-acknowledged client autonomy as a factor but did not resolve whether that principle independently justifies solicitation conduct that would otherwise violate the faithful agent duty. The tension between these two warrants is structurally unresolved because both are grounded in legitimate NSPE Code provisions, and the data of employer-initiated termination shifts the equilibrium without eliminating either warrant's claim.

This question arose because the Board acknowledged the at-will employment context as a relevant factor in permitting some pre-departure solicitation but did not explicitly adjudicate whether at-will reciprocity can serve as an affirmative ethical justification-as opposed to merely a mitigating circumstance-for conduct that the Questionable Competition Methods Prohibition would otherwise condemn. The structural gap between legal at-will symmetry and the independent ethical warrant against disloyal competition methods created a question the Board's analysis left open.

This question emerged because the Board created an asymmetric remedial standard-oral disclosure suffices during the notice period but brochure cessation is absolute after actual termination-without articulating why the written inaccuracy's misleading effect on non-negotiating brochure recipients is ethically tolerable during the interim period. The data of ongoing brochure distribution to prospective clients who may never enter active negotiation activates the Proactive Marketing Material Accuracy Obligation as a warrant that the conditional permissibility principle does not fully rebut, generating a structural tension the Board's two-tier framework left unresolved.

This question arose because the data-Engineer A's receipt of termination notice while possessing client relationships and specialized project knowledge built entirely within Engineer B's firm-simultaneously triggers two structurally incompatible warrants: one authorizing post-departure competition and one constraining knowledge-enabled solicitation. The question persists because the rebuttal condition (that employment-derived client knowledge cannot be cleanly separated from employment-derived project knowledge) dissolves the temporal boundary the permissibility principle depends upon.

This question arose because the data-Engineer A soliciting current clients during the notice period following employer-initiated termination without a written non-compete-simultaneously activates a categorical deontological loyalty warrant and a symmetry-based release warrant, and deontological frameworks cannot easily adjudicate between them because the categorical nature of the duty conflicts with the relational condition that grounds it. The question is irreducible because deontological analysis must determine whether the categorical duty of loyalty is agent-relative (surviving regardless of employer conduct) or relationally conditioned (modified by the employer's own breach of the employment relationship).

This question arose because the data-covert pre-departure solicitation affecting multiple parties with divergent interests-requires consequentialist analysis to aggregate incommensurable harms and benefits across Engineer B's business interests, clients' epistemic autonomy, and profession-wide trust, with no shared metric for comparison. The question persists because the rebuttal conditions are empirically contested: whether clients were harmed or merely served earlier, and whether professional trust was damaged or merely tested, cannot be resolved without factual determinations the ethical framework alone cannot supply.

This question arose because the data-Engineer B distributing a brochure naming Engineer A as a key employee during the notice period without proactive disclosure-exposes a gap between the Board's intent-differentiated conditional ruling and the virtue ethics standard, which evaluates character rather than situational compliance. The question persists because the Board's ruling addresses what Engineer B must do in specific circumstances, while virtue ethics asks what kind of professional Engineer B is, and these are not the same inquiry.

This question arose because the data-Engineer B's post-termination continuation of a brochure misrepresenting Engineer A's employment status-creates a three-party duty structure (to clients, to Engineer A, and to the profession) that deontological analysis must evaluate categorically, while the Board's own ruling introduces an intent-differentiated and correction-based framework that implicitly treats the violation as conditionally rather than absolutely impermissible. The question persists because deontological analysis cannot simultaneously honor the categorical nature of the honesty duty and accommodate the Board's intent-sensitive, correction-remediable framework without resolving which duty structure governs.

This question emerged because the Board's condemnation of Engineer A's solicitation rested heavily on its covert, undisclosed character rather than on the act of solicitation itself, creating a structural gap in the argument: if the warrant against solicitation is grounded in deception and breach of trust rather than in competitive mobility per se, then a hypothetical in which all deception is eliminated by full disclosure directly contests whether the warrant still applies. The question thus probes whether the faithful agent duty operates as an absolute prohibition on pre-departure client contact or as a conditional prohibition triggered only by the absence of transparency.

This question arose because the Board's analysis treated the notice period as ethically equivalent to ordinary employment without explicitly addressing whether Engineer B's unilateral decision to terminate created a morally relevant asymmetry that should have modified the faithful agent analysis. The timing dimension - whether post-notice but pre-termination solicitation is categorically different from mid-employment solicitation - was left unresolved, inviting the question of whether the Board's conclusion would have differed had it engaged directly with the employer-initiation variable.

This question emerged because the Board's conditional approval of Engineer B's notice-period brochure distribution rested on the adequacy of oral disclosure without specifying why written correction was not required, leaving open a structural gap between the honesty principle's demand for accurate professional representations and the Board's apparent acceptance of a lower-cost oral remedy. The question probes whether the Board's 'conditional' ethical approval was itself ethically under-demanding by failing to require the more reliable written correction mechanism that the errata sheet would have provided.

This question arose because the Board articulated an absolute post-termination prohibition without explicitly grounding it in the materiality prong of its own dual-element pertinent fact test, creating a logical tension between the categorical rule and the case-by-case analytical framework the Board simultaneously endorsed. The question exposes whether the absolute prohibition is a genuine categorical rule or an implicit application of a materiality judgment that the Board made without stating - and whether that unstated judgment would survive scrutiny when applied to a non-key employee whose departure is unlikely to influence any reasonable client's contracting decision.

The Board concluded that notice-period brochure distribution was conditionally permissible provided Engineer B orally disclosed Engineer A's pending departure during active negotiations, but the conclusion itself critiques this standard as an ethical floor rather than a ceiling, arguing that virtue ethics demands affirmative written correction because oral qualification of a written misrepresentation does not produce an accurate overall impression in the mind of a prospective client.

The Board resolved Engineer B's post-termination brochure use as an absolute prohibition but left Engineer A's reciprocal obligation unaddressed; this conclusion fills that gap by reasoning that once Engineer A became aware of the ongoing misrepresentation, Section II.5.a required Engineer A to formally demand cessation in writing and, if necessary, notify affected prospective clients directly rather than passively allowing the misrepresentation to persist.

The Board implicitly rejected Engineer A's at-will symmetry argument by establishing that ethical obligations persist where legal obligations do not, reasoning that the faithful agent duty under I.4 is not contingent on the existence of a non-compete clause and that at-will reciprocity describes only the absence of contractual barriers to departure, not an affirmative ethical license to solicit a current employer's clients during the notice period.

The Board reached conditional permissibility for notice-period brochure distribution by accepting oral disclosure as sufficient, but this conclusion critiques that resolution as internally inconsistent because it holds Engineer B to an absolute written-accuracy standard after termination while tolerating a merely verbal correction standard during the notice period when the misrepresentation risk to prospective clients is materially equivalent, and argues the Board should have required a written addendum or errata sheet accompanying each brochure distribution.

The Board concluded that Engineer A's conduct was unethical because soliciting an employer's clients for a competing venture while still employed violates the faithful agent duty under I.4 and the prohibition in III.4.a on arranging new employment relationships without the consent of all interested parties, determining that Engineer A's competitive mobility rights do not activate until after the employment relationship has actually ended.

The board concluded that distributing a previously printed brochure listing Engineer A as a key employee was not unethical during the notice period because the oral disclosure made to the prospective client during negotiation corrected the potentially misleading written record in time to protect the client's informed decision-making, thereby satisfying the material accuracy standard of III.3.a without requiring Engineer B to discard or reprint existing marketing materials.

The board concluded that post-termination distribution of the brochure was categorically unethical because Engineer A was no longer an employee in any capacity, rendering the listing an outright misrepresentation of the firm's personnel rather than a contingent or transitional one, in direct violation of II.5.a and III.3.a, with no corrective oral disclosure present to mitigate the false impression conveyed to prospective clients.

The board concluded that Engineer A's failure to disclose the ongoing solicitation to Engineer B constituted an independent breach of the faithful agent obligation under I.4, separate from and aggravating the solicitation itself, because the covert character of the conduct denied Engineer B the ability to protect client relationships during the notice period - a protection the employer is entitled to as a consequence of the continuing employment relationship.

The board concluded that the original analysis was underspecified because it failed to distinguish employer-initiated from employee-initiated departures: when Engineer B unilaterally terminated Engineer A for lack of work, the moral weight of Engineer A's reciprocal loyalty obligation was diminished - not eliminated - and the board should have articulated a distinct, less severe ethical standard for pre-departure competitive conduct in involuntary displacement scenarios, even while affirming that the faithful agent duty under I.4 continued to constrain Engineer A's conduct during the notice period.

The board concluded that Engineer A's use of privileged insider knowledge about Engineer B's clients - including awareness of their specific needs, pending projects, and vulnerabilities - to target those clients for solicitation constituted an independent ethical violation under III.4.a beyond the mere act of solicitation, because such knowledge was obtained solely in a professional capacity and its competitive deployment without consent of all interested parties crossed a line that general professional mobility rights cannot justify, a distinction the original board analysis failed to articulate by treating the solicitation as a single undifferentiated act.

The Board resolved Q19 only partially: it affirmed an absolute prohibition on post-termination brochure distribution where Engineer A was listed as a key employee, because that designation is categorically material to prospective client contracting decisions and therefore satisfies the pertinent-fact element of the misrepresentation test under III.3.a - but the Board explicitly declined to articulate whether the same prohibition would apply if the departed employee had been listed in a peripheral, non-material capacity, leaving the materiality threshold unresolved and the standard potentially over-inclusive.

The Board concluded that Engineer A's failure to disclose the covert solicitation to Engineer B constitutes an independent breach of the faithful agent duty under I.4, separate from the solicitation itself, because the duty of faithful agency imposes an affirmative obligation of candor that was violated by Engineer A's simultaneous performance of employment duties and secret redirection of client relationships - conduct that Section III.4.a is specifically designed to prohibit and that cannot be excused by framing the solicitation as merely informing clients of a choice they are entitled to make freely.

The Board resolved Q5, Q9, and Q17 by holding that employer-initiated termination does not create a distinct ethical standard for pre-departure solicitation, because the faithful agent duty under I.4 is not contingent on the reason for departure and persists until actual termination - meaning Engineer A's solicitation during the notice period was ethically impermissible regardless of who initiated the separation, and the at-will symmetry principle, while legally intuitive, cannot serve as an ethical justification for conduct that would otherwise violate loyalty obligations and create perverse incentives for client-raiding upon receipt of any termination notice.

The Board concluded that Engineer A holds a secondary but real ethical obligation to proactively notify prospective clients or formally demand Engineer B cease distribution, because II.5.a prohibits permitting misrepresentation of one's qualifications or associations and Engineer A's knowing silence in the face of Engineer B's continued post-termination brochure use constitutes such permission by omission - though this secondary obligation does not equate to Engineer B's direct and primary ethical violation of distributing the misleading brochure.

The Board concluded that Engineer A's use of specialized insider knowledge to target Engineer B's specific clients constitutes an independent ethical concern under III.4.a beyond the mere act or timing of solicitation, because leveraging proprietary relational capital - client identities, project needs, and relationship dynamics accessible only through employment - without consent of all interested parties is categorically distinct from a departing engineer who incidentally encounters a former client post-termination, and the Board's failure to address this as a discrete question left the ethical standard under-theorized with respect to the method of solicitation as opposed to its timing.

The board concluded that Engineer A's solicitation was unethical because the faithful agent duty under Section I.4 directly governs conduct during employment and prohibits using the employment relationship as a platform for competitive self-promotion, while client autonomy - though a genuine value - only restricts Engineer B's ability to contractually block client switching and does not create any right or obligation for Engineer A to solicit during active employment.

The board concluded that at-will employment symmetry cannot justify pre-departure client solicitation because ethical duties under Section I.4 and the Questionable Competition Methods Prohibition under Section III.7 exist independently of contractual arrangements, and accepting the symmetry argument would permit any employee anticipating termination to immediately exploit employer resources and relationships for competitive gain without ethical constraint.

The board concluded that Engineer B's continued brochure distribution during the notice period was conditionally permissible provided oral disclosure of Engineer A's pending departure was made during active negotiations, but the conclusion itself identifies this as an underinclusive resolution - a more rigorous application of the honesty provisions under II.5.a and III.3.a would require written corrections accompanying each distribution rather than case-by-case verbal qualification.

The board concluded that Engineer A may freely solicit Engineer B's former clients after departure under the Former-Client Solicitation Permissibility principle, but the conclusion itself critiques this resolution as ethically underinclusive because the very knowledge enabling targeted post-departure solicitation was acquired through employment - a more coherent framework would distinguish general professional knowledge from specific proprietary intelligence and apply a continuing confidentiality constraint to the latter even after termination.

The board concluded from a deontological perspective that Engineer A violated a categorical duty of loyalty under Section I.4 because the Kantian universalizability test reveals that permitting any employee who receives termination notice to immediately solicit the employer's clients would systematically destroy the trust relationships on which employment depends, and because Engineer A's use of employer-provided client relationships as instruments for competitive self-promotion without consent treats the employer as a mere means rather than an end in itself.

The board reached this conclusion by systematically disaggregating harm across three affected parties - Engineer B, Engineer B's clients, and the profession broadly - and finding that each suffered a distinct and real harm, while Engineer A's countervailing benefit was both modest and avoidable, making the consequentialist calculus decisively against Engineer A's conduct.

The board concluded that Engineer B's conduct was conditionally permissible but not virtuous, because a person of genuine professional integrity would not rely solely on oral correction during negotiations when written marketing materials containing a known inaccuracy were being actively distributed to prospective clients who might never enter those negotiations.

The board reached an absolute prohibition on post-termination brochure distribution by identifying three distinct and simultaneous deontological wrongs - deception of prospective clients, unauthorized exploitation of Engineer A's professional identity, and undermining the profession's collective honesty commitment - and concluding that the categorical nature of the duty of honesty forecloses any exception based on competing practical interests.

The board concluded that full prior disclosure and open client notification would have made Engineer A's conduct substantially more defensible by eliminating concealment and respecting client autonomy, but would not have rendered it fully permissible because the fundamental conflict of simultaneously serving Engineer B while competitively soliciting Engineer B's clients would have persisted regardless of transparency.

The board concluded that its ethical assessment would not have differed materially had Engineer A waited until after actual termination, because post-termination solicitation is fully permissible, and that the employer-initiated nature of the departure does not shift the ethical balance during the notice period because the relevant boundary is between preparation and solicitation rather than between voluntary and involuntary departures.

The Board concluded that Engineer B's notice-period brochure distribution would have been closer to unconditionally ethical - though still not entirely free of concern - had Engineer B issued written errata sheets at the point of each distribution, because written correction would reach all recipients and create a documented record, whereas oral disclosure only during active negotiations leaves non-negotiating recipients with a potentially misleading impression; the Board's conditional permissibility ruling is therefore characterized as a pragmatic minimum, not an endorsement of oral-only disclosure as the ideal standard.

The Board concluded that post-termination brochure distribution would remain ethically impermissible even if Engineer A had been listed as a non-key, peripheral employee, because the categorical honesty obligations under Sections II.5.a and III.3.a prohibit false statements of fact regardless of degree of materiality; however, the Board also recognized that the pertinence element of the Dual-Element Test would be weaker for a peripheral employee, meaning the absolute prohibition applies with full force to key employees while the same conduct involving peripheral employees, though still impermissible, represents a less serious violation.

The Board concluded that client autonomy does not dissolve the faithful agent duty during active employment but instead defines the outer boundary of what that duty can legitimately restrict once employment ends, thereby treating the faithful agent duty as a near-absolute constraint during the notice period and client autonomy as a structural marketplace principle that becomes operative only after departure - a resolution that weights employer-protective obligations more heavily than client-protective principles during the employment relationship itself.

The Board exposed but never fully resolved the tension between the conditional permissibility of oral disclosure during the notice period and the proactive accuracy obligation that would seem to require written correction, instead establishing a graduated ethical standard - permissive with oral disclosure during active negotiations, conditionally permissive during the notice period, and absolutely prohibited after actual termination - that calibrates Engineer B's accuracy obligation to the escalating risk of client misimpression rather than applying a uniform written-correction requirement across all stages.

The Board concluded that the temporal boundary of employment - not the source or nature of the knowledge used - is the primary ethical dividing line for competitive solicitation, treating that boundary as a bright line precisely because the question of whether specialized knowledge acquired during employment taints post-departure solicitation has no clean answer; by resolving the case on the narrower faithful agent ground, the Board left structurally unresolved whether the Specialized Knowledge Constraint survives termination of employment or evaporates once the faithful agent duty ends.

The Board reached this meta-conclusion by synthesizing its three substantive determinations into a unified graduated framework: it found that Engineer A's pre-departure solicitation violated the near-absolute faithful agent duty regardless of at-will symmetry arguments or client autonomy claims (answering Q1, Q4, Q5, Q7, Q8, Q9, Q12, Q13, Q16, Q17), that Engineer B's notice-period brochure distribution was conditionally permissible provided oral disclosure occurred during active negotiations but fell short of the higher written-correction standard that virtue ethics or a proactive accuracy obligation might demand (answering Q2, Q10, Q14, Q18), and that Engineer B's post-termination brochure distribution constituted an absolute categorical misrepresentation under II.5.a and III.3.a that admitted no exceptions based on the employee's role materiality or printing costs (answering Q3, Q6, Q11, Q15, Q19), with the overall architecture teaching that the NSPE Code applies its principles with phase-sensitive weight rather than uniform force across the arc of an employment transition.

Should Engineer A solicit Engineer B's current clients for a new competing firm during the notice period, or refrain from solicitation until after actual termination?

Should Engineer A disclose to Engineer B that Engineer A is actively soliciting Engineer B's current clients during the notice period, or proceed with solicitation without informing Engineer B?

Should Engineer B accompany each brochure distribution during the notice period with a written errata sheet disclosing Engineer A's pending departure, or is oral disclosure during active client negotiations sufficient to satisfy the honesty obligation?

Must Engineer B immediately cease distributing all brochures listing Engineer A as a key employee upon Engineer A's actual termination, or may Engineer B continue distributing previously printed materials while arranging for reprinting?

Should Engineer A take affirmative steps to correct Engineer B's post-termination brochure misrepresentation - by formally demanding Engineer B cease distribution or notifying affected clients directly - or treat the correction obligation as resting solely with Engineer B?

Should Engineer A limit client solicitation to contacts made without leveraging insider knowledge of Engineer B's client project needs and vulnerabilities, or may Engineer A use all employment-acquired client intelligence to identify and target solicitation efforts?