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As Futurewei and its parent company Huawei filed a lawsuit against their ex-principal engineer Yiren Ronnie Huang (“Ronnie”) in December 2017 (see our last post on this blog), Ronnie, in response, filed a lawsuit at a California state court against Futurewei and Huawei (collectively “Defendants”) to seek judicial relief from the compulsory assignment of his inventions to Defendants set forth in his employment contract with Defendants. Between January 2011 and May 2013, Ronnie was a principal engineer at Futurewei, specializing in R&D. Ronnie’s employment contract contains compulsory invention assignment provisions that are so broad that Ronnie was required to assign his rights to inventions that he developed entirely on his own time without using Defendants’ resources or trade secrets, and even inventions that Ronnie developed within one year of termination of his employment with Futurewei.
Ronnie believed these overbroad provisions unlawfully restrain his ability to engage in his profession and especially to operate his own company-CNEX Labs, and therefore are unenforceable under the California laws. Defendants first successfully moved this case from a state court to a federal district court in California, and then further filed a motion to transfer this case to a district court in Texas. On September 25, 2018, the Court granted Defendants’ motion, and this case was now transferred to Texas.
Written by Derek Tai
