Ethical Job Problem

Forgive me if I’m not understanding this properly.

I don’t know if the books you had made and the ones you made with notes were of things that you designed on projects that the firm was doing or things outside of the firm.

Their projects are technically their copyright material even the parts that you did while working for them unless it is work that you were stamping yourself. They have every right to protect their material. They have no obligation to allow you to use the parts of their projects that you worked on as portfolio material. It may not seem fair, but stuff generated by an employee working on their projects is THEIR intellectual property. You have no right to have books made of the work that you did while working for them. …. especially true if there is no reference to the firm on the work.

Totally different story if these works are nothing to do with their projects.

From the ASLA ethics page, https://www.asla.org/ContentDetail.aspx?id=4276. The 2nd sentence is more relevant.

[from R1.109] “Commentary: Members shall not take credit for work performed under the direction of a former employer beyond the limits of their personal involvement and shall give credit to the performing firm. Employers should give departing employees access to work that they performed, reproduced at cost, and a description of the employee’s involvement in the work should be noted on each product and acknowledged by the employer.”

Bottom line, the work you did is yours, unless you signed some sort of agreement stating otherwise. Your former employer may beg to differ as to what your role was. Going forward, I encourage you and anybody working for somebody else to be diligent about saving copies of work. Document the heck out of what you did as you go.

Best of luck to you!