NetApp has filed suit against Nimble Storage, one of its fastest growing rivals, for allegedly engaging in anticompetitive behavior and colluding with three ex-employees to steal trade secrets.

The vendor claims that the hybrid array startup lured former staffers to “join the company and to take NetApp confidential information with them.” It accuses Michael Reynolds, Daniel Weber and Sandhya Klute of participating in the scheme and violating their contractual obligations and post-employment restrictions.

The complaint also mentions that Nimble hired 55 NetApp employees between July 2012 and July 2013, and that the group makes up 15 percent of the company’s total workforce and half of its leadership team. If true, defendants and management should both expect to face some tough questions in court.

A busy justice system

The tech industry has kept the justice system busy these past few weeks. Earlier this month, Rockstar Consortium, a patent holding company owned by Apple, Microsoft and other big name technology companies, declared war on Google with a lawsuit claiming that the search giant infringed its intellectual proprietary. The patents in question cover techniques for sorting information, querying databases and matching search terms with relevant advertising.

The feud between Google and Rockstar traces all the way back to 2011, when the consortium beat out Google at purchasing the wreckage of bankrupt Canadian telecom Nortel. The $4.5 billion deal bought the coalition thousands of patents covering 4G wireless innovations and other technologies, some of which conveniently overlap with the algorithms that power Google’s core business.

A few days before Rockstar’s latest offensive crossed the wire, we reported that Hewlett-Packard is seeking billions of dollars in damages from seven leading suppliers of optical disk drives. HP claims that the companies, which together control 90 percent of the the market, artificially inflated prices over a six-year period.