Apple has dropped a lawsuit against a former executive it had accused of poaching employees for his startup, Bloomberg reports.
The lawsuit came after Gerard Williams III left his Apple lead chip architect role in 2019 to co-found Nuvia Inc, a chip design company acquired by Qualcomm in 2021. As Engadget notes, Williams had spent nearly a decade working for Apple before he left and had led the development of important milestones for the company, such as its A7 mobile device chip.
After Apple filed the lawsuit, Williams filed his own and claimed Apple attempted to stop his firm from hiring its engineers while recruiting staff from his startup Nuvia at the same time.
As Bloomberg reports, Apple requested that a California court dismiss the case this week. In its request, Apple did not explain why it sought to dismiss the case, and Apple did not immediately respond to PCMag’s request for comment.
Apple’s move to drop the lawsuit came after Williams had reportedly failed to convince a judge to dismiss Apple’s complaint accusing him of violating a contract by using company resources to make an idea for his chip design startup Nuvia.
According to Engadget, prior to submitting its case dismissal request, Apple had sought the recusal of the judge overseeing the litigation because he had worked closely with the two attorneys the company had hired as counsel. In subsequent meetings with Apple and Williams, Judge Kulkarni had told them that his recusal from the case would result in a delay in the trial starting. The case had been scheduled to go to trial on Oct. 2, 2023.
Williams’ legal team had opposed the recusal, arguing in a brief filed on April 6: “Even if a conflict existed that might warrant recusal, the procedure imposed by the Court – allowing the party that introduced the ‘conflict’ and would theoretically stand to benefit from it – to decide whether to waive it is inconsistent with basic rules of fairness and due process.”