The defendants were high-technology companies Adobe, Apple Inc., Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay, each of which was headquartered in Silicon Valley, in the southern San Francisco Bay Area of California.
Cold calling is one of the main methods used by companies in the high-technology sector to recruit employees with advanced and specialised skills, such as software and hardware engineers, programmers, animators, digital artists, Web developers and other technical professionals.
[2] According to the legal brief filed by a plaintiff in one of the class-action cases, cold calling is an effective method of recruiting for the high-technology sector because "employees of other [high-technology] companies are often unresponsive to other recruiting strategies... [and] current satisfied employees tend to be more qualified, harder working, and more stable than those who are actively looking for employment.
In US v. Adobe Systems Inc., et al., the Department of Justice alleged that Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, and Pixar had violated Section 1 of the Sherman Act by entering into a series of bilateral "No Cold Call" Agreements to prevent the recruitment of their employees (a similar but separate suit was filed against Lucasfilm on December 21, 2010).
[11][12] The case was filed on May 4, 2011 by a former software engineer at Lucasfilm and alleges violations of California's antitrust statute, Business and Professions Code sections 16720 et seq.
Focusing on the network of connections around former Apple CEO Steve Jobs, the Complaint alleged "an interconnected web of express agreements, each with the active involvement and participation of a company under the control of Steve Jobs ... and/or a company that shared at least one member of Apple's board of directors".
[15] However, in late April 2014, the four remaining defendants – Apple Inc, Google, Intel and Adobe Systems – agreed to settle out of court.
In a letter he wrote to the judge he said the settlement represented only one-tenth of the $3 billion in compensation the 64,000 workers could have made if the defendants had not colluded.
[21] On September 8, 2014, Judge Koh set April 9, 2015 as the actual trial date for the remaining defendants, with a pre-trial conference scheduled for December 19, 2014.
[23] On Wednesday September 2, 2015, Judge Lucy H. Koh signed an order granting Motion for Final Approval of Class Action Settlement.