Motorola files suit to prevent former executive from joining Nokia

By on Jan 19, 2010 at 6:40 PM
General January 19, 2010

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David Hartsfield, formerly of Motorola, has found himself tangled in a legal battle with his previous employer. The issue? He’s going to work for Nokia. Last week, Motorola filed an emergency motion in an Illinois district court to prevent Hartsfield from becoming Nokia’s global vice president of CDMA business. While employed at Moto, Hartsfield was the executive responsible for CDMA device development and worked on such projects as Verizon Wireless’ DROID. Motorola’s suit claims, “Hartsfield cannot erase his knowledge of Motorola’s confidential information… In working on Nokia’s CDMA mobile devices, Hartsfield could not compartmentalize his knowledge to prevent himself from using Motorola’s confidential information.” Motorola did not cite any wrongdoing or a non-compete agreement in their suit; the case has been moved to a U.S. District court.

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  • jeff

    First

    • mingkee

      Such guy has no life at all.

  • Joe

    1st, Jeff…you’re gay.

    2nd…there was an article about this on my last LSAT, and if that article was true, which they say they are typically factual, this will be a difficult case for Moto to win.

    • Mr. Anderson

      ha ha joe called jeff gay. now THAT’S funny!

  • http://www.incrediblesoftwaresolutions.com/blog Hilary Albutt

    Oh Please, how ridiculous!! ooh you cannot work where you wish? What happened to freedom of association and freedom of speech and yes the right to work where the work is?

    The simple thing is to get the exec to sign a non-disclosure. Motorola probably did not. Boo Hoo.

    • BigBoy

      Freedom of speech is a liberty often misunderstood. It simply applies only to the government preventing you from saying things that are anti government.

      At work the only thing that matters is whatever contract you signed and refresh every year.

  • http://palfrei.blogspot.com palfrei

    Even though it seems to me that Motorola is right on their claim, how is this man going to find a job if he can’t use his experience in another company when it is fundamental for building the best CV possible?

    However, didn’t Motorola hired former Apple employees to design MotoBlur?

    I understand why Motorola is being so protective with its intellectual property now that things have started to go a little better for the company [and I bought a Milestone, so I want for them to do the best and keep supporting their models] but this doesn’t seem fair. That being said, most companies profit from the experience of former employees from their competition.

    • John

      I believe that Motorola has to do this to in order to fulfill their fiduciary duties/obligations to the shareholders.

      The Blur concept is not that unique. I’m sure it was simply the first time MOT and the carriers finally agreed to allow the engineers to implement it.

      Hartsfield may have some inside knowledge that MOT doesn’t want shared, but these days Nokia is a Qualcomm CDMA house and MOT is obviously partnered with OMAP…

      It makes me wonder if he may have seen some flaws in that partnership and decided to switch to a team with a brighter future.

  • Agd

    Ha seems like they are having same problem with apple and the emplyees that left to work for palm and not to mention the CEO of google…

  • bigrocket

    Even if there is a non-compete, the real question is if it is enforceable. What the amount and nature of the consideration (for signing the non-compete agreement)?

    • kidphat

      That’s what I was thinking. If he signed a non-compete, then doesn’t Motorola have grounds for suing?

  • cartoon

    if they dont want him to work there then they need to keep him and pay him more…if not…shut that hole up

  • mingkee

    We need to not to buy motorola products.
    They dismissed the employees first and now they even don’t want the employees to join another employer!
    How ridiculous/tyranny they are!!!

    • MonkeyCheese

      Nice try. If you read the article it says the guy resigned his position to take a job at Nokia. Meaning he left on his own terms. They didn’t fire the guy.

      Also, the article says how another executive did the same thing but went to work for Apple in 2008 and Moto sued him as well. They stated that “he violated a two-year non-compete agreement.” The case was dismissed.

  • Nokia N900

    Join the dark side… (we’ve got cookies!)

  • StevenGlansburg

    Didn’t this happen with apple and palm?

  • Carl

    They’re not gonna win unless they have an anti-compete clause. Even if they have that it must be limited in terms of duration.

    He can’t reveal trade secrets to Nokia but he doesn’t have to “erase” his knowledge of his trade. This is a BS claim.

  • Percy

    Wow! End of MOTO?

  • rene

    simple solution to this bs, just go to Finland, get job contract over that country,the USA law doesn’t extend there, and end of the problem.

    simple

  • Anthony

    Is this America. Or a comunist cointry?! What the heck is wrong with motorolla, so what does this guy do? Apply for welfare? Learn to run a buisness mottorolla get a attorney and have a standard confidentiality contract with all employees. I’m sure it was not signed so tough

    • Eloy

      If it was a communist country there would be no Motorola and no Nokia.

      In America because of capitalism there is something called competition. The guy should at least wait a year and then join Nokia. But maybe after a year Nokia will not need him anymore as his knowledge will be considered out-dated.

      So why the rush to join Nokia?

  • Channan

    Don’t know why you think this is such a bad thing. He knows confidential information about Motorola. They don’t want him taking their ideas and putting them into Nokia phones. Perfectly understandable. Whether they have grounds to sue is beside the point, but what they’re doing makes perfect sense, and many companies would probably attempt the same thing.

  • Ben

    They have to enforce their non-complete or the rest of their non-completes are weakened (precedent). Standard employment law issues.

  • Ben

    oops – meant non-competes. That is the second time I have misspelled this word today. Standard English issues :-)

  • rederikus

    1). If he signed an employee non-disclosure, then Motorola has nothing to fear. Professional knowledge is acquired from a variety of sources, not just from one’s employer. An exception here could be a contart clause frobidding working for the competition

    2). If Motorola is trying to stop someone from free choice of employment then they are going to lose unless there is a clause as I said in 1).

    3). If there is no clause, then Motorola may well find that they are paying this guy NOIT to work for them.

    4). The emplyee obviously feels that Nokia is a better company and that he will do better for himself there. He will bring industry and market knowledge to Nokia that will comprise technical, market and competeitive knowledge.

    The man should join Nokia and have them fight off Motorola. After all, they are already fighting Apple.

  • derrentech

    oh pleaaase what is he gonna share with Nokia, like those piece of shi*** phones Moto brings out all the time. Moto, until you know how to build tech dont scream cuz noone wants your ‘tech on down syndrome’. The guy probably realized that Moto is going under therefore jump ship before it goes down seems like a logical move. Moto will not exist in 5 years, mark my words.

  • http://sdx-developers.com Numus

    This is standard business as usual… Motorola doesn’t have a foot to stand on, but they will sue and try to get an injunction against David Hartsfield because they pretty much have to… This is why these firms have massive legal departments, this stuff happens every day, but usually not that high of a profile to attract media attention… More then likely motorola will be judged against and David will be able to switch to Nokia.. Non-compete contracts are usually only good for toliet paper in the grand scheme of things…

  • http://sdx-developers.com Numus

    It is also funny how motorola has no problem entering into a contract with Google to develop android 2.0 for their phone before the SDK is even release (read: motorola had 2.0 developed for them BEFORE any other manufacturer could even look at the code, let alone implement it for their product)… How is that fair that they had a monopoly on a product that under the GNU GPL should hav ebeen avalible to everyone?

    • alen

      under open source you usually only release the code once you ship a product. until that happens you can keep it secret

      • http://sdx-developers.com Numus

        Its a slippery sloap.. They got around it by stating the code was “under development”.. Funny how it was stable enough for a phone to utilize it but not stable enough to release it to toher manufacturers so they could start development.. It was all done to get google the press on 2.0 and give motorola a step up above the rest (since it would be 2-4 months development work to recode the OS by other manufacturers)

  • Fredo

    Most courts take a dim view of this type of attempt to restrain and individual from making a living. Many non-compete agreements end up being only partially enforceable, if at all. The only industry where this has been even remotely successful is in the television/radio/entertainment industry.

    Didn’t Johnathan Rubenstein leave Apple to become the CEO at Palm, after being a key player on the iPhone team? You can be sure Apple had a non-compete agreement when he was at Apple. When it comes down to it, most courts don’t like to tell people they can’t go out and work for a living.

    You can restrict the infringement of copyrights, patents etc. by the person, but not letting them work assumes they will violate rather than innovate. And there’s no way to know that until you can actually see the fruits of their labor. My bet is, Motorola loses eventually, but costs everybody some hefty $$$ in the process.

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