In a case that could send a chilling message to gossipy Silicon Valley tech workers, a former Yahoo employee has admitted in court papers that she broke her employment agreement by leaking confidential information to a journalist who wrote a book about CEO Marissa Mayer.
Cecile Lal, sued by Yahoo in May for breach of contract and fiduciary duty, has agreed in a settlement to pay the Sunnyvale company an undisclosed sum and cooperate with its ongoing investigation of the leak by handing over any documents she still possesses. An agreement between Yahoo and Lal that effectively ends the dispute was filed last month at the Santa Clara County Superior Court.
She s just not going to contest the case, said her lawyer, Ronald Cook, in an interview. It s a mutually agreed resolution which also is a mutually agreed decision not to discuss any details.
Yahoo did not respond to requests for comment Tuesday.
Business Insider writer Nicholas Carlson relied heavily on dozens of anonymous sources to recount Mayer s first two years running the struggling Internet pioneer, including several unflattering missteps, in the book Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo! , which appeared on bookshelves in January.
Lal quit her job last year. Yahoo was furious about the book, alleging in its lawsuit against Lal that it caused unnecessary distraction within Yahoo s workforce and undermined the conduct of every other Yahoo employee who honored a promise to safeguard confidential information.
Lal was a senior director of product management, custom-branded experiences and partner portals before she left in September. The company described her in the suit as a former rogue employee.
Along with communicating with Carlson by phone and email, the lawsuit accused Lal of giving the author access to a password-protected site with confidential information about the company. The leaked information apparently included Mayer s comments during all-staff FYI meetings that happen each Friday in the Sunnyvale company s cafeteria.
Carlson declined comment Tuesday.
In one scene in Carlson s book and a December story he wrote for the New York Times Magazine, Mayer opened up a children s book during an FYI meeting and read it to employees. In other scenes, she was asked tough questions about a controversial employee-review policy that ranked workers on a curve. Transcripts of those meetings are kept on an intranet site called Backyard that is accessible to full-time employees, according to the lawsuit.
The settlement document filed in the San Jose courthouse on July 1 says Lal admitted disclosing certain confidential Yahoo information to Carlson. To end further legal proceedings, she agreed to: pay a confidential sum for damages incurred by Yahoo as a result of her breach of the company s contract and code of ethics; a court ruling that orders her to immediately return all confidential information in her possession; cease accessing or disclosing any more Yahoo confidential information.
Staff writer contributed to this report.
Above: Yahoo s corporate headquarters in Sunnyvale in January. (LiPo Ching/Bay Area News Group)