Apple and Google anti-staff-poaching case to end - report

Tech giants among Silicon Valley foursome accused of conspiring not to poach rivals' staff, limiting workers' options on career progress

A legal case in which a quartet of tech giants were accused of limiting their own staff's career choices is set to come to a head shortly, according to reports.

Apple, Google, Adobe and Intel were accused of making secret deals among themselves not to poach each other's tech staff in separate lawsuits which were eventually combined into one, the New York Times (NYT) reports.

Workers would have been limited in their options for career progression while the alleged agreement was in place.

But the long-running dispute is expected to come to a head as early as later on today.

A source told the NYT that the tech foursome is offering to pay $415m (£273m) to settle the case, and if a judge approves this, it will come to an end.

Competition for staff is a key challenge across the tech industry and the IT channel – the thorny issue of non-compete clauses reared its head in 2013 when a recruiter blasted Phoenix Software for writing a clause into staff contracts which forbade them from working at certain rivals if and when they left the firm.

Last year Trustmarque strongly defended itself when it emerged it had told firms interested in looking at its accounts during its period of financial uncertainty that they would be unable to poach its staff for a certain period should any potential deal fall through.

Neither Apple, Google, Adobe nor Intel were available for comment at the time of first publication.