P.F. Chang’s moved to voluntarily dismiss Tuesday a 2022 lawsuit alleging that HR services provider UKG breached a contract between the two parties when it lost the restaurant chain’s employee data and information.
According to the filing in P.F. Chang’s China Bistro v. UKG, Inc., P.F. Chang’s informed the Delaware Court of Chancery that both parties would bear their own attorney’s fees and costs.
UKG and P.F. Chang’s owner Paulson & Co. did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The years-long dispute began in March 2021, when P.F. Chang’s ended its UKG service and requested that UKG provide a full copy and transfer of all databases it had stored on UKG’s UltiPro software product, according to the 2022 complaint.
Amid the transfer, P.F. Chang’s notified UKG that it had been subjected to litigation and asked UKG to retain all of its data until further notice. UKG allegedly confirmed that it would pause the deletion of P.F. Chang’s data as part of a “decommissioning” process that followed P.F. Chang’s termination of service.
In the year that followed, P.F. Chang’s allegedly discovered that some of the employee data it had stored in UltiPro did not successfully transfer from UKG.T he restaurant chain claimed that a UKG representative had told P.F. Chang’s that UKG had lost some of the data, and P.F. Chang’s further alleged that UKG provided “false hope” that the data could be retrieved.
The subsequent dispute between P.F. Chang’s and UKG played out in legal filings and email exchanges between attorneys — some of which were viewed by HR Dive — that portrayed a contentious back-and-forth between the two firms. P.F. Chang’s asked the court to issue an injunction to prevent UKG from deleting its data as well as monetary damages, attorneys fees and expert witness fees.
In a Dec. 3 status update to the court, F. Troupe Mickler IV, attorney for P.F. Chang’s, said that it had recovered a “large number of files” from UKG and that the chain was analyzing the data. “Once again, we remain hopeful that the parties’ process will result in the voluntary dismissal of this action without the need for further action from the Court,” the attorney said.