Hello, welcome to another MLEX podcast. I'm James Panicki, Mlex's Australasian managing editor, coming to you from Melbourne, Australia. Great to have your company. Now, as listeners and subscribers know only too well, our antitrust beat usually involves the regulation of big, grey, faceless companies.

It's not often that we get to cover the human element in antitrust stories, but it does happen.

For example, when large corporations reach agreements not to poach

each other's staff, how do things pan out? The company's logic for engaging in no-poach

agreements is easy enough to understand. The last thing they want is a wage explosion in the

hiring of often highly skilled managers or engineers. But what's good for companies isn't always good

for employees, and much to the surprise of some US executives, no poach agreements are also

downright illegal. Admittedly, we're not talking about people on minimum wage here. These are

well-remunerated, highly skilled professionals. yet secret handshakes behind closed doors to keep

wages down are as much of an antitrust issue as cartels and price fixing. Leah Nyland is Mlex's

chief global antitrust correspondent under normal circumstances. She's in our Washington, D.C. office,

but today she joins us from Hong Kong.

Hello Leah.

Hello, James.

Now, firstly, let's define this issue a little better.

What does the US Justice Department mean when it refers to no-poach agreements?

Well, they're generally referring to one of two types of agreements.

There's the no-poch agreements.

These are ones in which two companies

or more get together and they agree that they're not going to solicit one another's employees.

So when they have a job opening, they're not going to approach employees from the other company

about filling it. Or sometimes they will agree just not to hire employees from one another's

...