A123 Systems Suing Apple, Ex-Employee For Poaching Engineers

According to the article, a123 is not suing due to employee divulging of trade secrets specific to a123. They are suing because "they are losing employees that can shutdown their operations" Sounds like sour grapes. A123 may or may not have a breach of contract suit, but that is with the former employees, not apple. One can't sure because another company offers an employee and more promising offer. One can't sue because one now apple employee knows who other good employees are at a123 and recruits them. or do you think think companies should not recruit and only hire the jobless or those that apply?

Apple profits per employee are $460,772, revenue per employee is $2.13 million. It's unlikely to be worth it for Apple to outsource high stakes engineering jobs.

They aren't suing the worker bees. Mujeeb Ijaz was a CTO.

@burgersandbeer It's immaterial who or what an employee is/was. In America, any employee is free to pursue employment wherever they wish, unless under a "specified period of time contract" to their current employer. That's why it doesn't make any sense to me that employees picket and strike for higher pay from their employer because if they were worth as much to that employer as they think they are, their employer would have paid them what they were worth to begin with. I say kudos to Apple for hiring the best and the brightest! And I also say kudos to Wal-Mart for raising the pay of those 500,000 employees that are worth more. That's what pay is all about: merit.

@highdesertcat Apparently A123 is actually suing five former employees, not just Ijaz. Still worth noting that the suit is for violating non-disclosure, non-compete, and non-solicitation agreements. The employees are free to seek employment elsewhere - as long as they don't bring trade secrets with them while soliciting former coworkers in a position to do more of the same. At least that's how A123 sees it. If we are lucky, maybe ttac has an employment lawyer reading this and can shed some light on whether these agreements are typically enforceable.

@burgersandbeer Non-disclosure and non-compete clauses are enforceable. When my wife's dad sold the real estate portion of their business, a non-compete clause was included. We cannot compete with the new owners in any form or shape or appearance thereof. But non-solicitation? I called our family and business lawyer, married to my wife's youngest sister, and he said it all depended how it was written and what it was specifically applicable to. Unless there is a contract that specified how long these employees were to remain wedded to the company, it would be difficult to find any recently-prudent individual to find for the plaintiff. And as far as trade secrets are concerned, there are plenty of work-arounds that people come up with, once they identified the desired outcome, without infringing on proprietary trade secrets. Such was the case in the early 1980s with the battle between the CP/M OS and MS-DOS, and whether the IBM PC and PC-AT called for proprietary protection in the battles of the 8086/8088, Motorola 64000, and other CPUs that ultimately provided the same results even though each got there a different way. And lets not forget VHS vs Beta, or Apple vs Samsung today.

@burgersandbeer highdesertcat, the law distinguishes between non-competes made as a part of the sale of a business, and those made as part of an employment contract. The former are generally enforceable (so long as they're reasonable), while the latter may or may not tbe enforceable (depending on a number of factors and the law of the state that governs them) Non-disclosure agreements are also generally enforceable, but very difficult to prove. I don't know any of the specifics of the A123-Apple case, so I won't comment on it. It is the case, though, that where Company A engages in a deliberate campaign to weaken or destroy Company B by hiring away key people and their knowledge, Company B can seek damages for unfair competition. Again, these are usually difficult cases to prove.