Apple, Google, Intel, Adobe agree to 'new settlement deal' in employee poaching lawsuit

Four tech giants including, Adobe, Intel, Google, and Apple, have reportedly agreed to a new settlement deal in an antitrust lawsuit that claimed that the companies had forged an agreement to not poach each others' employees.

District Judge Lucy Koh had earlier rejected a $324.5 million settlement offered by the four tech companies by terming it insufficient, after one of the named plaintiffs objected. The full value of the new settlement has although not been revealed but Koh had said last year that a new compensation would have to total at least $380 million, reported The Verge.

The companies reached an agreement on Tuesday, four years after the lawsuit was brought against them by workers in the Silicon Valley.

The case was fuelled by emails exchanged between high-level executives including, Apple’s Steve Jobs and Google's Eric Schmidt, in which they asked each other to stop poaching each others’ employees thereby limiting job mobility.