A high Tesla legal professional, Lynn Miller, has exited Elon Musk’s electrical automobile firm and is becoming a member of Plus as basic counsel, the autonomous trucking start-up introduced Tuesday.

Based in 2016 and as soon as often called PlusAI, the corporate not too long ago agreed to go public by way of a particular function acquisition take care of Hennessy Capital Investment Corp. V. Plus is following within the footsteps of TuSimple, one other autonomous trucking start-up now buying and selling on Nasdaq.

Tesla has its personal ambitions in heavy-duty automobiles and driverless methods. Nevertheless, Tesla’s former president of heavy trucking, Jerome Guillen, recently left the company, and questions are swirling about whether or not and when Tesla will lastly be capable of manufacture the all-electric Semi it first confirmed off in 2017. In March, CEO Elon Musk said a decent provide of battery cells was making it exhausting to scale Semi manufacturing, however he predicted the state of affairs would turn out to be “much less onerous subsequent yr.”

Miller’s most up-to-date function at Tesla was deputy basic counsel, in accordance with Plus. She follows Tesla‘s longstanding vice chairman of authorized and appearing basic counsel, Al Prescott, who left in April to hitch Luminar, a lidar start-up. Tesla beforehand misplaced three basic counsels over the course of a yr in 2018 and 2019.

Additional shake-ups on the high of Tesla’s authorized division may show difficult at a time when the corporate is going through new lawsuits, ongoing federal probes and trials that have been long-delayed because of the influence of Covid on U.S. courts.

Throughout her 7½-year tenure at Tesla, Miller final served as deputy basic counsel for the corporate’s litigation, regulatory and privateness teams, in accordance with her LinkedIn profile. She was beforehand a senior litigation supervisor for Apple for greater than a decade.

In 2016, Law.com reported, Miller defeated “a significant securities go well with that questioned the security of Tesla’s Mannequin S.”

Plus, which is headquartered in Cupertino, California, with R&D places of work in China, has said it expects to lift $500 million in gross proceeds from its public itemizing by way of SPAC. The funds ought to assist Plus develop and commercialize their driverless trucking expertise.

The beginning-up additionally introduced that it had nabbed new hires for senior director to VP-level roles, together with Chuck Joseph from Amazon Transportation Providers, Lori Heino-Royer from Daimler North America Vehicles, and Wiley Deck from the U.S. Division of Transportation.