A nearly three-year-long court battle came to an end this week with HP agreeing to settle a class-action lawsuit brought by a group of shareholders after former CEO Leo Apotheker backtracked on his much-touted vision for webOS in August 2011.

The mobile operating system, which HP obtained through the 2010 acquisition of Palm, was supposed to underpin its entire portfolio of consumer products, from printers to mobile devices. But that plan fell apart following poor market reception of the platform, which many considered technologically superior to Android at the time of its launch in 2009. Apotheker left his post in the aftermath, and webOS has since been open sourced and subsequently sold to LG, which now uses it to power its line of smart TVs. The remaining Palm patents were picked up by chip maker Qualcomm in January as part of a broader deal that also included intellectual property pertaining to Bitfone, a mobile device management firm HP bought in 2006, and Compaq’s 14-year-old iPaq pocket PC.

The company’s efforts to mitigate its losses from $1.2 billion purchase of the mobile device maker were not enough to satisfy the plaintiffs, however. To make up for the fiasco, HP will deposit $57 million into an interest-bearing escrow account within 20 days of obtaining an approval by U.S. District Judge Andrew Guilford.

The settlement comes a month and a half after Apotheker, along with current CEO Meg Whitman and the entire HP board of directors, were slapped with a similar lawsuit by investor A.J. Copeland charging they had failed “in their most fundamental stewardship responsibilities owed to HP”. The complaint cites the $8.8 billion writedown on Autonomy as one of several examples of mismanagement that allegedly eroded the company’s share price.

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