Sometimes we hear about Apple going after a former employee who is allegedly trying to steal trade secrets with them when hired to compete. This is the case with Chen Shi, a former sensor system architect on the Apple Watch team. Details are here.
Apple claims that Shi worked for the company from January 2020 until several months ago. He went out to Oppo, a Chinese company that makes phones and wearables like the Oppo Watch.
Apple says in late June that Shi “lied to his colleagues and falsely claimed that he had a tendency to older parents and had no plans to seek new employment.”
The company also claims that before leaving Apple, Shi holds meetings, collects documents, downloads sensitive information according to its logs, and searches online for information such as “How to clean up your MacBook.” And while downloading the information from Apple’s shared drive, he replied, “Can someone check if you opened the file on the shared drive?”
“I’ll share it with you later.”
Perhaps Shi and Oppo’s Vice President of Health, Zi Zijing Zeng, PhD, one email exchange included in the lawsuit is probably one email exchange.
“It is scheduled to start on 6/30. This week we will inform our team about our resignation. We have been reviewing various internal materials recently and have had many 1:1 meetings to gather as much information as possible.
Apple goes on to say, “As opposed to protesting Dr. Shi’s obviously inappropriate behavior, Dr. Zeng responded “It’s okay” and sent a “OK” emoji.”
Finally, Apple has laid out a series of remedies in courts that include punitive awards, injunctions to stop OPPO and SHI from using trade secrets and destroying evidence, lawyer fees, and “other reliefs that the court thinks are appropriate.”
