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By Bloomberg

The $415 million settlement wrangled out of Silicon Valley behemoths including Apple Inc. and Google Inc. over an alleged wage-fixing conspiracy may win approval because of lawyers’ willingness to take a pay cut.

In a second bid to end a four-year battle over claims the companies conspired to avoid hiring from one another, employees would get $90.5 million more than in the original accord rejected by a judge in August, while their lawyers’ take remains fixed at $81 million.

For what the attorneys say is the second-largest settlement of a group case on behalf of workers, their pay day would be about $23 million less than they would pocket from a typical 25 percent cut of the total.

“This is the plaintiffs’ lawyers effectively putting several million dollars on the table from what is arguably their own pockets, to try to make the deal go through,” Christopher Sagers, a Cleveland State University law professor, said in an e-mail.

U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose, California, “will likely have some real sympathy for this fact,” Sagers said. Given that the new proposal is $35 million more than the amount the judge said might be sufficient when she rejected the initial $324.5 million accord, it’s “awfully likely” Koh will go along with it, he said.

For the companies, which include Adobe Systems Inc. and Intel Corp., approval of the deal would remove the threat of a jury trial that might result in damages of more than $9 billion in a case that the judge has said presents “ample evidence” of antitrust violations. Koh is set to consider the agreement Monday.

Internal E-Mails

The case, which was scheduled for trial in April, already has generated a trove of internal e-mails detailing anticompetitive agreements among the chief executive officers at technology giants. One such message cited as evidence was sent to Apple co-founder Steve Jobs in 2007 from Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, who said the company was terminating “within the hour” a recruiter who contacted an Apple employee in violation of the companies’ “do not call policy.”

“Apologies again on this and I’m including a portion of the e-mail I received from our head of recruiting,” Schmidt, then chief executive officer of Google and an Apple board member, wrote to Jobs. “Should this ever happen again please let me know immediately and we will handle. Thanks!! Eric.”

Jobs responded to the message with a smiling emoticon.

As the case lingered, it also sparked new lawsuits claiming other technology and entertainment companies engaged in the same anti-competitive conduct. Last year, complaints relying on evidence from the case before Koh were filed against DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc., Walt Disney Co., units of Sony Corp., Oracle Corp., Microsoft Corp. and IAC/InterActiveCorp.

Lawyer Fees

The fees the plaintiff lawyers stand to collect in the Silicon Valley case amount to 19.5 percent of the $415 million accord, which they say is well below a 25 percent benchmark for such cases. They said only one class-action employment case in U.S. history got a better result, a sex-discrimination suit against the federal government that settled for $508 million in 2000. That case was in court for 23 years.

The Silicon Valley case, filed in 2011, mirrors claims the companies settled with the U.S. Justice Department in 2010.

When Koh rejected the original accord in August, she said the settlement fund should be bigger in light of a $20 million deal reached earlier with three other companies sued by employees -- Intuit Inc. and Walt Disney’s animation studio Pixar and visual-effects specialist Lucasfilm Ltd.

Rejections Rare

Rejections of antitrust settlements are rare, especially when objections are based on the amount and not a failure to meet legal requirements. The companies appealed Koh’s rejection even as they resumed negotiations with the plaintiff lawyers, led by Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein LLP and the Joseph Saveri Law Firm in San Francisco.

Robert Mittelstaedt, a lawyer representing the companies, and Kelly Dermody, a lawyer representing the employees, didn’t immediately respond to phone messages after regular business hours Sunday seeking comment on the proposed settlement.

Under the new deal, the average payout for the 64,000 workers covered by the case will be $5,077.72, according to a court filing.

That amount takes into account a $4.5 million fee request submitted by a lawyer representing a former Adobe employee who objected to the original settlement.

Extra Compensation

The attorney, Daniel Girard, contends his client, Michael Devine, deserves extra compensation for helping secure a bigger pot for all the workers. Girard said that Devine, for taking a risk in a high-profile case that may affect his job prospects, should get a “service award” of $160,000, twice the amount sought by four other employees who are lead plaintiffs.

Sagers, the law professor, said there’s no reason to believe the lawyer did $4 million worth of work.

Girard said his fee request isn’t an issue before the court at Monday’s settlement approval hearing and that evidence supporting it will be submitted at a later date.

The case is In re High-Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation, 11-cv-02509, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California (San Jose).