A surprising turn of events. Because as recently as Friday, it seemed very much business as usual for Watkins, who had the uniquely unpleasant task of announcing a forthcoming round of layoffs while at the Consumer Electronics Show last week. “We are going to announce another round, and we think we’ll do it in January,” he told Bloomberg on Jan. 9. “There will be restructuring, and there will be some layoffs.”

And, indeed, it appears there have been. Not only has there been an abrupt change in leadership, but according to a new filing with the SEC, Seagate plans to sack about 10 percent of its U.S. workforce as part of a restructuring plan that “will impact a broad range of departments, including research and development.” It is, of course, “being done in response to the current economic environment.”

Yesterday, Seagate (STX) filed a lawsuit in federal court accusing STEC Inc. (STEC), an early SSD maker, of patent infringement. In the suit, Seagate argues that STEC’s solid-state drive products violate four Seagate patents covering the ways those products communicate with a computer. The company requested an injunction and unspecified damages, which it asks be tripled if STEC is found guilty of willful infringement.

“The public perception has been that solid-state will take over the world and run disk makers out of business, but you can’t bring that product to market without licensing disk-drive technology,” said Seagate CEO Bill Watkins. “STEC infringes on a number of Seagate’s patents which are important to the entire industry. We thought they would have to learn how to do storage differently to avoid our patents, but they decided to go ahead and violate them. … We have spent $7 billion over the last 10 years to optimize how our disks work. This is the first lawsuit brought by a hard-disk company against a solid-state company. We are protecting the entire industry.”

That’s an altruistic way of looking at litigation that Watkins suggested in an interview in March was designed to protect Seagate’s own turf. After all, a Seagate victory in the suit could pave the way for cross-licensing agreements, not just with STEC, but with other SSD makers as well.