SAN FRANCISCO — A federal judge has approved a $415 million settlement that ends a lengthy legal saga revolving around allegations that Apple, Google and several other Silicon Valley companies illegally conspired to prevent their workers from getting better job offers.

The settlement of a class-action lawsuit will pay more than 64,000 technology workers about $5,800 apiece. The complaint, filed in 2011, originally sought $3 billion in damages that could have been tripled under U.S. antitrust law. Based on that figure, the workers could have received more than $100,000 apiece if they prevailed at trial.

Nearly $41 million of the settlement will be paid to lawyers representing the technology workers. That’s less than half of the roughly $85 million in fees that the attorneys had sought.

The approval granted Wednesday by U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose, California, dispenses with a case that exposed internal emails casting former Apple CEO Steve Jobs in an unflattering light.

The lawsuit depicted Jobs, who died in 2011, as the conniving ringleader of a scheme designed to minimize the chances that top computer programmers and other talented employees would defect to other technology companies. Koh last year rejected a $324.5 million settlement.


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