Saatchi, Burns Settle Lawsuit

NEW YORK Saatchi & Saatchi and Mike Burns, the former worldwide account director on the agency’s General Mills business, have reached an out-of-court settlement in a lawsuit that Saatchi filed last year, claiming that Burns had orchestrated the walkout of 17 Saatchi staffers in February 2005, all but one of whom worked on General Mills.

The mass exodus occurred three days after Burns, a 25-year veteran of Saatchi, left the Publicis Groupe shop. The ex-staffers landed at Interpublic Group, where they started an agency called OneSeven inside the office of IPG’s Lowe in New York.