$1.9 Million Wrongful Hire

Chandramouli Vaidyanathan claimed in his lawsuit that he uprooted his family from Dallas to take a non existent job at Seagate’s Advanced technology Group facility in Minnesota. He was recruited by Seagate as a yield engineer from Texas Instruments in 2008, but when he arrived in Minnesota the product he was hired to work on never reached fruition and he was laid off nine months later.

His attorney contended that Vaidyanathan was hired by the company to make its Advanced Technologies Group, which it was seeking to sell, more attractive to a buyer. The attorney Brent Snyder said: “It was beneficial for them [Seagate] to have a yield engineer on staff to give the appearance of a complete organization with a project that was further along in development. They were not able to sell or find a partner for the ATG group despite having him on board as the place-holder yield engineer.”

Vaidyanathan sued under a state law that makes it illegal to induce “any person to change from any place in any state, territory or country to any place in this state to work in any branch of labor through or by means of knowingly false representations.”