Left Real Estate Brokerage and Started My Own. Sued over Non-Compete

Assuming I need to answer these summons in the next 2 weeks and I will need an attorney. I am in NY State/NYC and have left the brokerage I worked at for 3.5 years. Prior to that, I owned a different brokerage and when I came on board, most of my agents did too. I ran the Agent Development division and shared commissions with the agents who joined my training program.

I was "given" the role of Director of Agent Development, a role that came with NO salary, just continued to get paid when we closed deals. I was also required to develop a training program and enforce it. I did this for 3 years working Monday-Friday 10AM-6/7PM, and on-call all hours.

Over the last 3.5 months there, the brokerage did not want to make any changes I wanted to implement and the program was failing. We negotiated weekly. I wasn't making any money, nor were the agents.

Now I've left and have a new brokerage. Roughly 20 of the 150 agents in my program quickly followed. -I did not solicit or recruit them, they just liked my style of training. And truthfully, the brokerage does very little for agents.

They are suing me for an amount to be decided by the NYC courts. I've grown pretty broke working for them, so they won't get much. But I'm trying to see how much of a leg they have to stand on.

Any thoughts are much appreciated.