Apple, Google settle poaching lawsuit for $415 million

Apple, Google and two other Silicon Valley companies have agreed to a $415-million payment in a second attempt to resolve a class-action lawsuit alleging they formed an illegal cartel to prevent their workers from leaving for better-paying jobs, AP reported.

The settlement filed yesterday in a San Jose, California, federal court revises a $324.5-million agreement that US District Court judge Lucy Koh rejected as inadequate five months ago.

According to Koh she believed the roughly 64,000 workers in the case needed to be paid at least $380 million, including attorney fees.
 
The lawsuit, filed in 2011, sought $3 billion in damages that could have been tripled under US anti-trust law. Attorneys for the workers decided on a settlement after concluding it would have been difficult to prove the alleged conspiracy to a jury.

If the latest settlement were to be approved by justice Koh, it would avoid a potentially embarrassing trial over claims that Apple, Google , Intel and Adobe Systems secretly agreed not to recruit each others' employees from 2005 to 2009.

In the motion, which still required court approval, the defendants continued to maintain that they had not engaged in any wrongdoing or violated any law, CNET reported.

"We deny the allegations contained in the suit and we deny that we violated any laws or that we have any obligation to the plaintiff," Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy said in an emailed statement. "We elected to settle the matter in order to avoid the risk, burdens and uncertainty of ongoing litigation."

After three other companies settled in 2013, the four remaining companies tried to avoid a potentially costly and drawn-out trial last May with an offer of $324.5 million to the plaintiffs to settle the matter.

Koh rejected the offer in August as she found it was too low. She wrote the offer would shortchange the plaintiffs on a proportional basis than employees covered by a settlement reached a year earlier with Lucasfilm, Pixar and Intuit -- the other three initial defendants in the case.

An e-mail exchange from late Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs was revealed in an unredacted court filing in January 2012, addressed to Google CEO and Apple board member Eric Schmidt, in which Jobs politely asked Schmidt to stop trying to hire one of Apple's engineers.

"I would be very pleased if your recruiting department would stop doing this," Jobs wrote to Schmidt on 7 March 2007.