Lawyers for four U.S. technology companies, including Texas Instruments, won a preliminary battle Wednesday to move lawsuits brought by five Ukrainian citizens who claim that microchips, processors and programmable devices made by the four companies are being used by the Russian military in its war against Ukraine.
But the victory for the technology firms could be a “be careful for what you ask” moment in the litigation.
The lawsuits, which were filed in December in state district court in Dallas, alleged that the defendants — TI, Mansfield-based Mouser Electronics, Advanced Micro Devices and Intel — sold their technology to third parties, which they knew or should have known were then providing those technologies to Russia to use in the war in Ukraine.
Within hours of the lawsuit being filed, lawyers for the defendants filed “notice of removal” motions in the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of Texas. The five cases were consolidated into one single matter.
Lawyers for both sides — and there are several high-profile names — appeared Wednesday before U.S. District Judge Sidney Fitzwater to do battle over jurisdiction.
But the attorneys for the Ukrainian citizens had a surprise — they withdrew their motion to send the case back to Texas state court. They now want the litigation to remain in federal court because of new evidence unearthed by the plaintiffs’ team and one of their recently hired experts.
“We have learned that three of these companies — TI, Intel and AMD — were told by the federal government that their practices for these products did not follow the U.S. Export Control Act,” Mikal Watts said.
Watts, a high-profile plaintiff’s lawyer who is also involved in the Winter Storm Uri and Johnson & Johnson talc powder litigation, declined to comment specifically on the new evidence but said that the plaintiffs no longer opposed the case being handled in federal court.
Judge Fitzwater instructed the parties to develop a scheduling order to move the case forward.
The importance of the litigation and the amount of money at stake were evident in the well-known lawyers on both sides of the litigation. Besides Watts, the plaintiffs’ team includes prominent Dallas trial lawyer Charla Aldous and Baker Hostetler lawyers Robert Julian, Dustin Dow and Lauren Attard.
The defense is led by Faegre Drinker lawyers Eli Burriss and Abbey Hernandez, Kirkland & Ellis partners Anna Rotman and Erin Nealy Cox, Tom Melsheimer of King & Spalding and Jeff Tillotson of Tillotson, Johnson & Patton.
The lawsuits were filed on behalf of victims killed or injured in a Russian attack on a large children’s hospital. The plaintiffs charge that TI and the other companies “through their willful ignorance of Russian and Iranian diversion of their products, have chosen to maximize profit ahead of and in favor of their duties to take reasonable, and legally required, steps to keep their products out of the wrong hands.”
The lawsuit alleges that “failures in the export-controls, sanctions-compliance and distributor-screening” by TI, AMD, Intel and Mouser allowed their “semiconductor components to be illegally diverted, including by foreseeable third parties, to Russia and Iran and then incorporated into precision-guided munitions and drones deployed against citizens.”
The primary case is Liudmyla Dmytrivina v. Texas Instruments, NDTX, Case No. 3:25-cv-03046.