After the employees sued Solyndra, the employees and the company reached a settlement for $3.5 million dollars. .
Ultimately, if it had gone to trial and the plaintiffs prevailed, which was likely given the evidence of delaying the announcement, they would have been awarded $15 million dollars in addition to attorney's fees (Investor's Business Daily, 2011). Other legal issues involved in this included whether or not Solyndra could use the faltering company exception as a reason to not give their employees at least sixty days of advanced notice of the layoffs. Solyndra was claiming that they gave the employees as much notice as they possibly could in the given circumstances (Smith, 2012). However, legally and ethically, political pressure and delay tactics should not have influenced Solyndra's decision on when to provide notice of the company closing and filing bankruptcy and they should have provided their employees with as much notice as they could without waiting until after the midterm elections. In the end, both parties submitted the settlement to resolve the WARN claims and eliminated further accrual of litigation costs associated to it (Smith, 2012).
A second legal issue facing Solyndra was whether or not the Department of Energy violated the law when they made the unprecedented decision to restructure the federally-funded Solyndra loan. It was discovered that the Department of Energy acted in interest of wealthy investors rather than in the interest of the taxpayers because they changed the terms of the loan to provide private investors with the ability to be repaid before the Federal Government (Upton, 2012). Specifically, the Energy Policy Act of 2005 generated a great deal of investigations when emails were found that indicated Department of Energy did not follow the requirement of making the government's financial debt not be secondary to other financing (Madhani, 2011).
