As a VP you have visibility into a wide section of the organization, you know where it is strong and where it is weak. As people get more senior they become more loyal to individuals rather than companies, so when a VP leaves, even without trying, they will often pull away other critical employees who follow the person not the company. Then there is the ability to disrupt without getting your hands dirty, an anonymous tip to TechCrunch to "watch this garage at 5AM on Fridays" or "You might want to dig into that unexplained event last October." which can put journalists on the trail of damaging information the company covered up (previously successfully).

If you are mad, and you feel like they have impeded your ability to get re-hired or funded at a later date, then you are more inclined to take some of these actions. If they say, "Look you have to go, but we'll make it comfortable for you and we'll just call it a day." then you might feel more charitable to them and forego starting processes that will cause them pain.

A technique I was told was used on an executive at Sun was to give them a stock grant that would only be "vested" in 5 years. The purpose was to keep it in that person's best interest to insure the Company was not damaged in order to reap the maximum reward down the line. To be clear, they got the stock in 5 years no matter what, it was just in their interest to have it be worth as much as possible at that time.

The ones I can think of:

* They have more money to spend on lawyers.

* They expected windfall from the lawsuit is higher, so law firms would be more inclined to accept the case and spend more resources on it.

* At lower levels, people are given boilerplate contracts written by company lawyers and told to take it or leave it. Apart from things like remuneration, nothing is up for negotiation. These contracts often heavily favour the company and make lawsuits difficult. At higher levels, contracts are genuinely negotiated between the lawyers for both sides.

* It is unlikely that a director could create or move to another company and start successfully poaching their former colleagues. A VP or higher level executive probably could.

Managers and directors at Google-sized companies know nothing of the inner workings and personal lives of the core leadership team of the company. VP and above often do.

This carries weight. Former VP of Eng at Ubeam https://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.com/

Leaving to fork Android at Samsung or some such, for one