Are Non-Competes Enforceable for Dentists and Dental Staff in Alaska?

This research found no Alaska statute behind these rules — they come from the Alaska Supreme Court's decisions — and those decisions add up to four practical results for a practice owner:

• An overbroad covenant can be salvaged. If an overbroad covenant can be reasonably altered to render it enforceable, the Alaska Supreme Court held, the court shall do so — unless it was not drafted in good faith.
• You carry the burden. The employer must prove an overbroad covenant was drafted in good faith before a court will rewrite it.
• Customer-only restraints get a friendlier test than blanket bans on competing, and the lack of a geographic limit was irrelevant for that kind of covenant.
• Sale-of-practice covenants get less scrutiny than employment covenants, because buyer and seller are more likely to be of equal bargaining power.

There is no federal non-compete rule to fall back on either: the Federal Trade Commission's non-compete rule never took effect and was removed from the Code of Federal Regulations in February 2026, so a dental covenant lives or dies on state law.

How other states handle this — bans, dentist-specific statutes and income thresholds — is covered in our guide to non-competes for dental staff nationally.

Start with the caveat: this research found no Alaska statute governing employee non-competes, including none for dentists or other healthcare workers.

The finding comes from case research — the Alaska Statutes were not exhaustively searched — so confirm the current law with an Alaska employment attorney.

The anchor case is Data Management, Inc. v. Greene, 757 P.2d 62 (Alaska 1988): the Alaska Supreme Court held that if an overbroad covenant not to compete can be reasonably altered to render it enforceable, the court shall do so unless it determines the covenant was not drafted in good faith.

The same decision settled two points that shape your drafting: Alaska rejected the strict "blue pencil" rule for a reasonableness approach that lets courts fashion a covenant reasonable between the parties; and the burden of proving good faith is on the employer.

No Alaska statute names dentists, hygienists or assistants, as far as this research found — so there is no profession-specific safe harbor in Alaska law to draft around.

The one Alaska dental decision this research surfaced is Dominic Wenzell, D.M.D. P.C. v. Ingrim, 228 P.3d 103 (Alaska 2010) — a sale-of-practice case.

A dentist bought an Anchorage dental clinic under an agreement barring the selling dentist from the practice of dentistry within 15 miles of his old clinic for two years and within 10 miles for three more years.

Wenzell still shows how Alaska thinks about dental covenants: sale-of-business covenants get less scrutiny than employment non-competes because the parties are more likely to have equal bargaining power — which puts an associate, hygienist or assistant covenant on the stricter, employment side of that line.

This research found no Alaska statute capping duration or radius, so the cases' reasonableness tests — not a statutory maximum — decide what holds up.

• Employment covenants. Reasonableness is the touchstone — and if the clause is overbroad, the court can reshape it into an enforceable one, provided you prove good faith.
• Customer-only restraints. In Metcalfe Investments, Inc. v. Garrison, 919 P.2d 1356 (Alaska 1996), a covenant that only restrained doing business with the employer's customers — rather than banning competition — was judged by a less stringent reasonableness test, and a geographic limit was irrelevant.
• Sale of a practice. Under Wenzell, a court asks whether the restriction is no greater than is needed to protect the goodwill the purchaser acquired and, if so, whether that need outweighs the hardship to the seller and the likely injury to the public.

Two details from Wenzell matter on a buy or sell: the covenant stepped down from 15 miles for two years to 10 miles for three more — calibration, not a statutory formula — and when the selling dentist went to work for a federally funded non-profit offering free or low-cost care, competition with the sold practice is not presumed and must be proven.

A non-solicit restricts who a departing employee may contact — patients or staff — rather than where they may work.

The closest Alaska analogy this research surfaced is Metcalfe: a covenant that only restrained doing business with the employer's customers was judged by a less stringent reasonableness test than a blanket ban on competing, and a geographic limit was irrelevant.

Metcalfe was not a dental case, and Wenzell is the only Alaska dental decision this research surfaced — so have an Alaska employment attorney look at your specific patient non-solicit before relying on the analogy.

Confidentiality terms do the complementary work.

Under the federal Defend Trade Secrets Act, the owner of a misappropriated trade secret related to a product or service in interstate commerce can sue in federal court, and business information — including a patient list — qualifies only if you took reasonable measures to keep it secret and it has independent economic value from not being generally known.

The limit matters: a DTSA injunction may not bar someone from taking a new job, and conditions on the new employment must rest on evidence of threatened misappropriation, not merely on what the person knows.

For how patient and staff non-solicits are structured — and how other states treat them — see our guide to patient and staff non-solicits.

Alaska's reformation rule rescues a covenant only when the employer drafted it in good faith — and you bear the burden of proving that — so the leverage sits in the drafting and in the protections around it:

• Calibrate instead of copying. Tie the term and radius to the goodwill a departing clinician actually carries — the step-down in Wenzell shows calibration, not a template to copy.
• Treat reformation as a safety net. An overbroad clause is a wager that a court will edit it and that you can prove good faith. Draft so you never need the edit.
• Layer a patient and staff non-solicit alongside any non-compete, and keep the patient list genuinely secret — limited logins, confidentiality terms, no exports to personal addresses — so trade-secret law has something left to protect.
• Use training repayment agreements where you fund a hygienist's or assistant's training; our guide to training repayment agreements covers how they work.
• Write the operational terms into the agreement itself — notice periods, patient-record custody on departure, schedule handover — so continuity does not depend on the covenant.
• Check the license before you sign. A covenant is not a credential: our guide to dentist licensure in Alaska covers what an associate needs.

Finally, have an Alaska employment attorney review any covenant before it is signed — the case law rewards narrow drafting and gives an overbroad one only a conditional rescue.

If you are the clinician side of this negotiation, our guide to dentist non-compete agreements covers the worker's view.