Reuters is reporting this afternoon that Apple, Google, Adobe, and Intel have reached a settlement in their long-running antitrust lawsuit filed by employees who claim the companies agreed to not hire employees from one another.
The settlement comes just a month before the trial was slated to begin in the US District Court of northern California. The lawsuit covered more than 60,000 workers, and damages from the trial were expected to exceed $9 billion…
Reuter’s Dan Levine reports:
Four major tech companies including Apple and Google have agreed to settle a large antitrust lawsuit over no-hire agreements in Silicon Valley, according to a court filing on Thursday.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
For those that missed it, tech workers filed a class action lawsuit against Apple, Google, Intel and Adobe Systems back in 2011 for allegedly conspiring to avoid competing for each other’s employees, in an effort to evade a salary war.
That lawsuit was given the go-ahead by Judge Lucy Koh in the fall of last year, following a similar one from the Justice Department. The DOJ went after the same companies in its own antitrust suit, but it was settled quickly out of court.