On November 13, 2023, the DOJ Antitrust Division moved to dismiss its last remaining no-poach indictment.  In 2021, a Texas grand jury indicted Surgical Care Affiliates (“SCA”) and a related company for conspiring with competitors not to solicit each other’s senior-level employees.  While a motion to dismiss was pending in that case, a district court in Connecticut entered a judgment of acquittal (“JOA”) on labor market allocation charges brought against several engineering firms, ruling in United States v. Patel that, among other things, ample evidence of employees moving between the defendant companies meant that any conspiracy to restrict such movement could have had no “meaningful” effect on competition and was not illegal per se.    Continue Reading An Uncertain Future for DOJ’s No-Poach Prosecutions