California employment practice has been much in the news lately. First, Hewlett Packard Co. sued its former chief executive officer, Mark Hurd, to prevent him from taking a job as co-president of Oracle Corp. Then, the U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Division charged that six big tech companies — Apple Inc., Google Inc., Intel Corp., Adobe Systems Inc., Intuit Inc. and the Walt Disney Co./Pixar Animation Studios — colluded not to recruit each other’s employees via cold calls.
Both cases have now been settled. What is puzzling is that they arose at all. A noncompete agreement would have been enough to prevent Hurd from going to Oracle or to prevent cross-border work force raids. Did the lawyers whiff?
