Dean Harvey

Harvey founded and chairs the labor antitrust practice at Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein LLP, which the firm said is the first and only practice group of its kind.

That distinction came in handy when Dr. Danielle Seaman, then working at Duke University, was turned down when she applied for a job at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Told the schools had a reciprocal no-hire pact, she recalled there had been recent controversy over that issue.

"She Googled it. It turned out she'd heard about the case we filed against Google and Apple," Harvey said, referring to the 2013 no-poach class action that came to be known as the High-Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation, which the defendants--including Intel Corp. and Adobe Inc.--settled for $324.5 million. "So Dr. Seaman called us."

The result was a class action that led last fall to a $54.5 million settlement for 5,000 academic physicians at Duke and UNC. Seaman v. Duke University, 1:15-cv-00462 (M.D. N.C., filed June 9, 2015).

And there's more: "We put on our detective hats and found the agreement was enforced school-wide." Because the Seaman case covered only medical staff as plaintiffs, Harvey has just filed a follow-on class action on behalf of all non-medical faculty at the two universities. Binotti v. Duke University, 1:20-cv-00470 (M.D. N.C., filed May 27, 2020).

"The schools' defense in the first case was that the agreement didn't really exist during the time of the class period and that, anyway, given the nationwide competition among schools for faculty, it couldn't have had much impact," Harvey said. "We think we understand the background and that we have a pretty good case with the new suit too."

The Seaman settlement included a consent decree agreement ending any no-poach arrangement and requiring implementation of safeguards to ensure compliance. It also included an unprecedented role for the U.S. Department of Justice to monitor and enforce the injunctive relief aspect of the settlement.

Assistant Attorney General Makan Delrahim, who leads the antitrust division, praised the deal, saying, "Permitting the United States to become part of this settlement agreement...to obtain all of the relief and protections it likely would have sought after a lengthy investigation, demonstrates the benefits...for the American worker when public and private enforcement work in tandem."

For their work on the High-Tech Employee case that led directly to the Seaman case, Lieff Cabraser won the American Antitrust Institute's "Outstanding Antitrust Litigation Achievement in Private Law Practice" award. In November 2019, Harvey and Lieff Cabraser won the award for their work on Seaman.

-- John Roemer