Automotive giant Tesla and Rivian are heading to court, as the former allegedly said that the latter stole “trade secrets.” Tesla claims that the trade secret stolen is by their former employee who was further hired by Rivian.
Both of the companies are not able to resolve this matter out of court. Now it seems that they heading to trial for the same. In particular, Tesla filed a lawsuit against Rivian in 2020 over possibly stealing trade secrets. And they claim that this is done with the help of their former employees. As they stimulate them in order to bring the desired documents. However, the suspect company, Rivian has clearly denied the allegations.
Furthermore, at the time when Tesla filed a lawsuit. It wasn’t clear what would be the exact secrets Tesla claimed for. On the other side, it appears that the employees listed in the lawsuits were two recruiters. It includes an EHS manager and a manager of Tesla’s charging networks.
Tesla claims over the Rivian
The automaker stated that these employees brought “documents consisting of highly sensitive trade secret, confidential, and proprietary engineering information” when they start to work for Rivian.
Moving ahead, a year later, Tesla further expanded the lawsuit by claiming more specifically that Rivian is “stealing the core technology for its next-generation batteries.” According to Bloomberg, a new ruling from a judge is approving the case to move ahead after being first initiated three years ago.
A state court judge on Wednesday tentatively denied the employees’ request for a summary adjudication ruling — which would have dismissed Tesla’s claim that they had signed agreements and other contracts that forbade them from stealing proprietary information and disclosing it to competitors. The judge granted the employees’ request for a ruling on another claim by Tesla that the workers illegally accessed the company’s computers to copy and steal data.
Therefore, once the ruling got official, it must allow Tesla to go forward with its lawsuit against Rivian and the former employees. Three years later, the context is going to be more interesting. As of now both Tesla and Rivian partnered up, in order to help the latter adopt the NACS connector. The same was the standard designed by Tesla.
