CISCO lashes HP HR
By Sumir Singh

In the past, such differences between tech giants in USA and India were settled in Courts or via ‘leaked’ news articles to friendly media organizations.  But CISCO has taken a new approach by blogging about Hewlett Packard (HP) harassing ex employees so they cannot join CISCO.

The CISCO blog has the following post

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HP Sues Employees for Leaving – We Challenge HP to Support Employee Freedom
By Mark Chandler, Cisco

For the third time in two years, HP has filed a lawsuit to stop a former employee from going to work with Cisco – in one case, almost half a year after the employee had left HP in a voluntary reduction-in-force.  As headhunters and other companies are flooded with resumes from HP employees seeking safe ground amidst the chaos of executive turnover, we can probably expect to see more desperate moves to lock up human capital. In an unhappy work environment, it’s a strange decision to try to achieve employee retention by litigation.  And it can’t help recruitment efforts when it seems the corporate slogan could be changed from “HP Invent” to “HP Sue.”

In the first of the three cases, HP was so persistent in the litigation and so threatening, that the individual, who had retired from HP months before even talking to Cisco, withdrew. There seemed to be little concern with the stress that a big company turning its legal guns on an individual can cause.  In another case, an employee who worked in HP’s financial services group was sued to block her from working in Cisco’s customer finance group, even though there was no argument whatsoever that relevant intellectual property at stake.  She persisted and HP relented.  In the most recent case, just last week, the employee, who’d given HP over two decades of loyal service, had moved to California before starting work at Cisco.  He asked a California court to declare that he was protected by California law and that HP could therefore not enforce its non-compete.  A court hearing was scheduled in California, we notified HP and HP retained counsel.  Cisco also reached out to senior legal staff at HP to try lay out some voluntary steps to avoid further litigation and to give further reassurance that the employee wouldn’t even inadvertently leverage any HP confidential information.

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