Could be that Apple abused an NDA, or that poached employees used patented or confidential information when they joined Apple, but... explain to me why it apparently took over a decade to figure this out?
Did this company not notice that Apple had poached their employees and launched a product that used their proprietary technology in 2014? I feel like if someone has a business for 11 years that processes several trillion dollars in payments, you could probably have worked out that they ripped you off a little sooner.
This isn't a trivial nuance; if the internet isn't lying to me, according to Texas (and California) law, a theft of trade secret claim must be made within 3 years of the theft being discovered, or within 3 years of when by exercise of reasonable due diligence it should have been discovered.
If we are to believe that Apple (or the employees they poached) stole this company's trade secrets in 2013, and released a wildly popular product with it in 2014, it seems utterly ridiculous to claim that it took this company until 2022 to realize they were stolen. If that legal info is at all accurate, even if Apple did do this, I don't understand how the lawsuit could go anywhere.
Fun fact: While criminal prosecution is not the same as civil lawsuits, if I commit bank fraud or embezzlement from a federal financial institution--major federal financial crimes--the statute of limitations is still only 10 years. And the Texas statute of limitations for theft is 5 years. So if I broke into this company and stole a million dollars from them back then, I couldn't be prosecuted for it today if this was the first they noticed.
