NEW YORK: A federal judge will not allow a lawsuit accusing Apple Inc., Google Inc. and other technology companies of conspiring not to poach each other's employees to proceed as a class action, but left the door open for affected workers to eventually sue as a group.
In a decision released yesterday, US District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose, California said the five software engineers who brought the case had yet to show that the proposed class plaintiffs had enough in common to allow them to sue together.
However, in light of new evidence, she said the nature of the "alleged overarching conspiracy" and desire to litigate it all at once weighed "heavily" in favor of class certification. As a result, she gave the plaintiffs a chance to seek class certification again.
Other defendants in the case include Adobe Systems Inc., Intel Corp., Intuit Inc., and Walt Disney Co.'s Lucasfilm Ltd and Pixar units.
In a signal that class certification could be forthcoming, Koh appointed Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein and the Joseph Saveri Law Firm as co-lead counsels.
"The court has invited us to provide further answers to certain specific questions, which we are prepared to do," Saveri said in an email. "We are in the process of determining a schedule for doing that as quickly as possible."
Google spokesman Matt Kallman declined to comment on the decision, but said "we have always actively and aggressively recruited top talent."
The other defendants did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The defendants were accused of violating the federal Sherman Act and Clayton Act antitrust laws by conspiring to eliminate competition for labor, depriving workers of job mobility and hundreds of millions of dollars of compensation.
These allegations are similar to those raised in a US Department of Justice probe that ended in a 2010 settlement that forbade several of the defendants from entering an anti-poaching conspiracy, such as through the use of "Do Not Cold Call" lists.
Among the revelations in the litigation was a 2007 email trail involving Jobs and Schmidt, then an Apple director, over Google's apparent effort to recruit an Apple engineer.
After Jobs emailed Schmidt that he "would be very pleased if your recruiting department would stop doing this," Schmidt forwarded the email to others he urged to "get this stopped."
Koh also cited a January 2007 email from Ed Catmull, then Pixar's president and now president of Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios, to the head of Disney Studios that suggested a desire to avoid bidding up the price of talent.
"We have avoided wars up in Norther[n] California because all of the companies up here — Pixar, [Lucasfilm], Dreamworks, and [a] couple of smaller places - have conscientiously avoided raiding each other," he wrote.
FROM: REUTERS
