Judge Rejects $324 Million Settlement in Silicon Valley Hiring Conspiracy

The same judge who has presided over two high-profile patent infringement wars between Apple (AAPL) and Samsung has thrown out a $324 million settlement offered by Adobe (ADBE), Apple, Google (GOOG) and Intel (INTC) that would have settled a class-action suit alleging the IT heavyweights conspired not to hire each others’ talent.

Judge Lucy Koh bounced the proposed settlement between the IT companies and lawyers representing some 64,000 technology workers who sued over so-called behind-the-scenes “non-poaching” agreements that barred their hiring by the rival vendors. In rejecting the deal, Judge Koh figured the plaintiffs each would receive less than workers in a prior $20 million settlement between Intuit, LucasFilm and Pixar in the same case last year.

She concluded that, if anything, the plaintiffs case had grown stronger in the ensuing time between the two settlement agreements.

“The court concludes that the remaining defendants should, at a minimum, pay their fair share as compared to the settled defendants, who resolved their case with plaintiffs at a stage of the litigation where defendants had much more leverage,” Koh wrote, as reported in the local newspapers.

Judge Koh placed much of the blame for the hiring conspiracy on the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, former Google chief and current executive chairman Eric Schmidt and Intuit chairman Bill Campbell.

“There is substantial and compelling evidence that Steve Jobs … was a, if not the, central figure in the alleged conspiracy,” Koh wrote.

Adobe, Apple, Google and Intel offered the settlement in late April. The original claim resulted from five software engineers who sued the technology giants in 2011 for violating antitrust laws by secretly agreeing not to compete for each others’ workers. The case hinged on emails in which Jobs, Schmidt and other Silicon Valley rivals agreed not to poach each other’s top engineers.

Last October, Koh allowed the case to proceed as a class action, an order the tech giants appealed, claiming the suit covers employees with 2,400 job titles at seven different companies.

Damages in the case could have run to $9 billion if the workers had proved that the Valley’s prominent technologies companies invoked an “overarching conspiracy” not to recruit or hire each others’ talent to hold down their mobility and pay.