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Technology Stocks : Qualcomm Incorporated (QCOM) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Cooters who wrote (80519)	9/16/2000 10:02:23 AM
From: CDMQ	Respond to of 152472

Suit against Qualcomm given class-action status By Dean Calbreath STAFF WRITER September 16, 2000 More than 1,000 former employees of Qualcomm Inc. got a green light yesterday from San Diego Superior Court to pursue a class-action suit alleging that they were improperly denied stock options after their division was sold to rival Ericsson. In a tense two-hour court hearing, attorney David Kleinfeld, representing Qualcomm, argued strenuously against the class-action suit, saying that because the employees had individual grievances they should file individual complaints. But Judge John S. Meyer set aside such objections, saying there was "a predominance of common issues" among the ex-employees. Meyer scheduled the case to go to trial in February. "We're obviously happy that they got the class certified," said the employees' attorney, Leonard Simon, with the law firm of Milberg Weiss Bershad Hynes & Lerach. "This way we can try the case once instead of having 1,000 separate court cases." Estimates are that if Qualcomm loses the case, it could be forced to pay as much as $400 million. The case has its roots in Qualcomm's decision to sell its wireless-infrastructure division to Ericsson in the spring of 1999. During the sale, Qualcomm allegedly pressured 1,037 employees to sign agreements to take only a percentage of their unvested stock options, rather than claiming all of the options. As a result, many of the employees missed out on Qualcomm's huge stock jump last year, when the company became the top performer on the Nasdaq Stock Market. Much of Qualcomm's success was attributed to the Ericsson sale, which ended a long-running patent dispute. During yesterday's hearing, Simon argued that Qualcomm engaged in a pattern of duress to persuade the employees to forgo their options. "The employees were naturally concerned that their future jobs might be at stake, since many of them were going to go to work at Ericsson with the same supervisors they had at Qualcomm," Simon said. "Their future relationships with their supervisors could be at stake." Kleinfeld countered that the trial would dissolve into a series of individual "sob stories" rather than having the united complaint necessary in a class-action suit. Meyer rejected the argument, although he did leave the door open for individuals to drop out of the class action and pursue their own cases in court if they felt they had unique individual claims.