Four technology companies either headquartered in Texas or with large operations in Texas illegally supplied semiconductor components — microchips, processors and programmable devices — that have been used by Russia’s military to kill thousands in drone and missile attacks in Ukraine, according to five different lawsuits filed Wednesday in the Dallas County Court at Law.
The lawsuits claim that Dallas-based Texas Instruments, 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.
One of the lawsuits, a 106-page complaint filed on behalf of victims killed or injured in a Russian attack on a large children’s hospital, claims 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.”
“Defendants had extensive notice from government agencies, public advisories, forensic investigations and media reporting that their products were being diverted to Russian and Iranian weapons programs,” the lawsuit states. “Despite that notice, defendants failed to implement and enforce reasonable measures to prevent such diversion, in breach of their duties of care.”
“Plaintiffs seek to hold Texas-connected U.S. corporations accountable under Texas law for their own domestic conduct and omissions,” the lawsuit states.
When contacted by The Texas Lawbook, Mouser Electronics sent this statement via email: “We deeply respect the legal process and will respond to this matter in court, versus the media,” stated Kevin Hess, Senior Vice President of Marketing at Mouser.
The Lawbook also reached out to TI, AMD and Intel and will publish their comments once we receive them.
The dozens of plaintiffs named in the five lawsuits are victims and victims’ families of several specific Russian attacks on civilian population centers over the past two years.
Each of the lawsuits contend that technology — parts designed, manufactured and distributed by the defendants — was found in the drone remains in the attacks.
A team of prominent Texas lawyers, including Austin trial lawyer Mikal Watts, Dallas trial lawyer Charla Aldous and the Dallas office of Baker Hostetler, a national law firm with about 1,000 attorneys, are representing the plaintiffs.
“We are working with a team of war time prosecutors and investigators to help stop the exportation of this critical technology which allows Vladmir Putin to continue to terrorize and kill Ukraine people,” said Watts, who just spent 10 days in Ukraine meeting with witnesses and experts.
“Defendants, as manufacturers and suppliers of dangerous instrumentalities, knew or should have known that diversion of their semiconductor components to Russia posed a foreseeable harm that the components would be used to arm the Russian military to attack civilians in violation of international law,” Watts wrote in court documents. “The defendants had a common-law duty under Texas law to not entrust their dangerous instrumentalities to a known violent actor.”
In the lawsuit, the Texas lawyers claim that Dallas — not Kyiv — is the appropriate location for the litigation because Ukraine is an active war zone.
“Ukrainian courts and administrative buildings have been threatened or damaged by Russian attacks,” the lawsuit argues. “Court proceedings are frequently disrupted by air-raid alerts, blackouts and infrastructure damage. Requiring Plaintiffs, witnesses, attorneys, or court staff to litigate this case in Ukraine would expose them to serious and ongoing risks of injury or death and would severely impair the fair and efficient administration of justice.”
The lawyers for the plaintiffs also point out that the Ukrainian courts “lack compulsory jurisdiction over Texas-based Defendants and cannot compel production of Defendants’ Texas-held documents and witnesses, whereas Texas courts can.”
Aldous said that the lawsuits filed Wednesday are “using the law to say you can’t do that, and hopefully, to have an impact on events far away from home.”
“To think of these little children in a hospital and they’re on kidney dialysis so they’re already in some danger health-wise,” Aldous said. “And then, in middle of that, bombs and missiles are dropping on their heads. And those bombs and missiles contain American-made parts? It just turns my stomach. As lawyers, our duty is to serve our clients and we intend to do that as best we can. But it’s also our duty to serve the broader society and that’s what we’re doing here.”
The lawyers representing the plaintiffs include Watts of the Watts Law Firm; Aldous of Aldous Law; James Shaw of Carabin & Shaw in San Antonio; and Baker Hostetler lawyers Robert Julian, Dustin Dow, Lauren Attard, Renee Knudsen and Karina Loya — all in Dallas.
The primary case is Liudmyla Dmytrivina v. Texas Instruments.
RELATED: Mikal Watts: My 10 Days in Ukraine — ‘Stop the Chips, Stop the War’