Uber Waymo Trial Delayed After Justice Department Jumps In, Unprompted, To Tell Judge That Uber Was Withholding Evidence

Surprises

from the holy-shit dept

So lots of people were gearing up for the Waymo/Uber trial starting next week over Uber’s alleged efforts to get Waymo’s (Google’s self-driving car project) trade secrets. There are a whole bunch of issues around this case that are interesting — from questions involving what really is a trade secret to where the line is between controlling former employees and allowing people to switch jobs within an industry. But… all of that has been completely tossed out the window as more and more evidence piles up that beyond those key legal issues, Uber sure did some shady, shady stuff. This morning, the latest bombshell (in a long line of bombshells) is that the judge has delayed the trial after the Justice Department got involved, totally unprompted. No, really.

You have to piece together some of the details, because some of the key documents are heavily redacted, but let’s try to unpack what appears to have happened. Earlier this year, the judge in the case, William Alsup, referred the case to federal prosecutors to also investigate whether anything criminal had happened. Normally, in such cases, federal prosecutors will spend quite a while looking into the details and no one — including the judge who made the referral — will hear boo from the DOJ until charges are filed (if that ever happens). Except… that’s not what happened. Apparently while investigating the possible criminal behavior by Uber, the DOJ noticed that Uber had failed to hand over a key piece of evidence during discovery. Specifically, it appears to be a letter from a former Uber security analyst named Richard Jacobs, concerning efforts by Uber to access competitor trade secrets — and to conceal that information (there is some suggestion that this involved using disappearing messaging apps).

This would have been required to be handed over during discovery, but was not. And no one would have known about it, had the acting US Attorney for the Northern District of California not decided, unprompted, to let Judge Alsup know about it — leading Judge Alsup, just last week, to order Uber to hand it over to Waymo. You can get some of this from the heavily redacted filing made by Waymo’s lawyers, in which you can hear their exasperation over just finding this out.

Also, Judge Alsup order Jacobs to appear in court and answer questions, and reports from the courtroom suggest it’s been… messy. Reporters Kate Conger and Joe Mullin have been providing some fairly astounding color commentary. A few snippets from their tweets:

As computer security guru Matt Blaze points out, there are plenty of good reasons for companies to want to use secure communications — but doing so explicitly to avoid having your conversations show up during discovery certainly doesn’t look good in court.

Either way, Judge Alsup appears to be less than happy about all of this:

?We’re going to put trial off ? because even if half of what?s in that letter is true it would be a huge injustice to Waymo to have to go to trial now,? the judge said…

Judge Alsup also noted that “the public is going to hear everything” about this evidence, so there’s likely to be more coming down the road.

Once again, there are all sorts of interesting legal questions underlying this case — but as happens all too often, it appears that some fairly blatant bad behavior is likely to obscure much of that. While it may make for more entertaining stories, it can muck up some of the legal questions. Or, as lawyers sometimes note, bad cases make bad law. This is shaping up to be a bad case with a pretty clear pattern of incredibly bad behavior by Uber (which, of course, appears to be consistent with the company’s reputation). And, unfortunately, that seems likely to distract from some actually important issues that could have a much wider impact, concerning questions around trade secrets and employment.

But, no matter what, withholding evidence like this during discovery — not to mention some of that evidence being an explanation of how the company tried to avoid discovery — is a double layer cake of extremely sketchy behavior. It seems unlikely that this will end well for Uber.

Filed Under: autonomous vehicles, discovery, doj, evidence, richard jacobs, self-driving cars, trade secrets, william alsup
Companies: google, uber, waymo