Subpoena quelling effort by Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) COO Sheryl Sandberg – GOOG, INTC

Northern, WI 04/10/2013 (avauncer) – Sheryl Sandberg the Chief operating Officer of Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) (Current: $26.59, Down by 0.96%) will be seeking a block to a subpoena that requires her to give a deposition in the lawsuit. There are several corporate protocols where in certain companies have anti-poaching agreements with each other. These agreements prevent them from hiring employees who are currently on the payroll, from the other. Some employees have filed a lawsuit that alleges that anti-trust laws have been broken by seven technology companies and that inter-recruitment had been rampant.

Employees have been considerate                                   

In San Jose, California, U.S. District Judge Lucy H. Koh said U.S. Magistrate Judge Paul S. Grewal will be conducting the hearing that has been set up to resolve the opposition put forth by Sandberg. She told the suing employees’ lawyers that the deposition would be scheduled around 23 April. One of the lawyers for the employees, Kelly Dermody told Koh that they have been very cooperative with working around a schedule that is suitable to Sandberg. At that point of time the latter’s lawyer wasn’t present in court.

The defendants…

This case had been filed in 2011 and the other defendants include Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) (Closed: $426.98, Up by 0.18%), Intuit Inc (NASDAQ:INTU) (Closed: $63.80, down by 0.06%), Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC) (Closed: $21.75, Up by 3.13%), the Pixar animation unit of The Walt Disney Company (NYSE:DIS) (Closed: $59.14, Up by 0.54%), Lucas film Ltd as well as Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) (Closed: $777.65, Down by 0.36%). At one point Sandberg was an executive with Google. Both, Facebook and Sandberg are not defendants in the case.

The contention that the plaintiff’s lawyers have put forth is that the company’s senior executives had proactively entered into an agreement with each other to eliminate the existing non-solicitation pacts. This step had been agreed upon in an effort to dissipate competition amongst the companies.

Judge rules against employees

There had been a deposition of Larry Page the Chief Executive Officer of Google on March 22 and Alex Lintner the Intuit executive, on March 25. These had confirmed that Sandberg’s inclusion in the anti-trust case had been a relevant one. In a court filing on March 29, lawyers said that Google is of the opinion that Sandberg may not put forth any testimony that could either be considered to be admissible or which had the potential to lead to admissible evidence. Last week the companies won an order from Koh which potentially blocked thousands of employees including sous chefs and engineers from progressing as a group in claiming that their incomes had been restricted by the agreements that these companies had set up, not to recruit workers from each other’s company.

Sandberg had taken over the Google COO role in 2008 and had been appointed as the first female director of the company in June 2012. She also serves as the Walt Disney Director. Prior to joining Facebook, Sandberg was the vice president of the global online sales and operations at Google.