Apple Poaching Case: The Difficulty of Proving Damages

The problem is proving damages. you have to figure out: what % of the total number of employees could have been targets of poaching and suffered potential monetary losses from the no-poaching agreement. Hint: it's not the janitor, the chef, the secretaries,

Then you have to figure out how much wages/compensation was theoretically lost over contravening period. With the exception of superstar employees, it's probably not that much .

The prosecution didn't have a very strong case and judge Lucy Koh demonstrated judicial malfeasance by rejecting the settlement agreement. The correct ruling would have been to throw out the case due to a lack of provable damages.

I'm looking at it from a legal perspective, which tends to be lacking by the media that is more concerned with hype, sentimentalism, and page-views than impartiality.