Should employees be free to move at will from employer to employer? Should there be any constraints on this freedom of movement? Should employers be free to "pirate" employees from competitors? Value Partners, headquartered in Milan, Italy, and recognized as one of the major European management consulting firms, with clients in 40 countries and offices in 15 cities, was founded in 1993 by former partners of the Italian offices of McKinsey & Company. They opened their first overseas offices in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1994. By the end of 1997, its Sao Paulo office had 20 employees producing annual revenues of about US$5 million, assisting both Italian clients and local companies.

Rival Bain & Company, a major management consultancy, was founded in 1973 by seven former partners from the Boston Consulting Group, and is headquartered in Boston. Bain established its Sao Paulo office in October 1997 and by early November had hired away almost all of Value Partners' staff.

Value Partners filed criminal charges in Brazil and New York against Bain, alleging breach of trust and loyalty of its former employees (pirated away by Bain), and theft of confidential and proprietary information. The New York court ruled that the case would be more conveniently and efficiently dealt with in Brazil under the doctrine that New York was not the most convenient place to hear the case. Unfortunately for Value Partners, Brazilian law offered none of the US's significant compensatory and punitive damages for employee disloyalty and theft of intellectual property. However, the New York federal court also made it clear that Value Partners was permitted to re-file the lawsuit against Bain in a more convenient forum.

So Value Partners re-filed the case in Boston, the site of Bain headquarters. After a five-week trial, the jury found Bain & Company liable for unfair competition and tortuous interference and awarded Value Partners US$10 million in compensatory damages (the full award sought). The trial court, after awarding another US$2.5 million of interest, denied all Bain's post-trial motions