Every now and then, we hear about Apple going after ex-employees who allegedly try to take trade secrets with them when they get hired by the competition. That’s the case with Chen Shi, a former Sensor System Architect for the Apple Watch team. Here are the details.
According to Apple’s claim, Shi worked at the company from January 2020 until a couple of months ago, when he left to go work for Oppo, a Chinese company that also makes phones and wearables, like the Oppo Watch.
Apple says that in late June, Shi “lied to his colleagues, falsely claiming that he was returning to China to tend to his elderly parents and had no plans to seek new employment,” when in fact he had already taken a position at Oppo earlier that month.
The company also claims that before leaving Apple, Shi took meetings, collected documents and downloaded confidential information before, according to its logs, searching online for information such as “how to wipe out (a) macbook.” And in the middle of downloading information from Apple’s shared drives, he searched, “Can somebody see if I’ve opened a file on a shared drive?”
‘Will share with you later’
Perhaps more damning is one e-mail exchange included in the lawsuit, between Shi and OPPO’s Vice President of Health, Zi Zijing Zeng, Ph.D.:
“I’m planning to start on 6/30. This week I’ll inform my team about my resignation. Lately, I’ve also been reviewing various internal materials and doing a lot of 1:1 meetings in an effort to collect as much information as possible—will share with you all later.”
Apple goes on to say that “Rather than protest Dr. Shi’s clearly inappropriate conduct, Dr. Zeng responded ‘alright’ and sent an ‘OK’ emoji,” which is why Oppo is also listed as a defendant in the case.
Finally, Apple lays out a series of remedies it’s asking the court to grant, including punitive awards, injunctions to stop Oppo and Shi from using its trade secrets or destroying evidence, attorneys’ fees, and “other reliefs as the Court deems appropriate.”
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