The legal battle between Uber and Waymo has taken a new turn. Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley has ruled that the cab aggregator needs to hand over the unredacted term sheet of its agreement with Otto to Waymo. What’s more, the company has been asked to comply with the order by the end of the day.
The Judge said that Uber’s arguments for keeping the documents hidden did not held any merit.
I don’t see any basis whatsoever for those redactions to be made and for that information to be withheld from Waymo.
Uber has also refused to provide Waymo with a diligence report, and the Google backed unit is expected to go after the diligence report next. The company wants the diligence reports because it believes that it can answer a lot of questions and because Anthony Levandowski has been hiding those reports citing his fifth amendment rights.
Uber on the other hand, has been claiming that turning those diligence reports in was not possible because it contained confidential information between attorneys and clients.
Meanwhile, Levavndowski is now required to submit privilege logs justifying his assertion of the Fifth Amendmentagain. He had already submitted them however, Judge Alsup called them useless.
To give just one example, entire pages of the spreadsheet in response to RFP No. 3 consisted of line items that identified ‘document type’ as ‘loose e-mail attachment’ and were otherwise blank. Similarly, dozens of pages of the spreadsheet in response to RFP No. 1 appeared dedicated to email attachments identified only by email account, time stamp, and otherwise wholly non-descriptive information. It would be wrong to suggest that any of those ‘privilege log’ entries could justify any claim of privilege.
Levandowski is certainly in dire straits. After removing him from LiDAR, Uber last week told him that he stood in danger of getting fired until he either denied that he downloaded any documents, or hand those documents back to Waymo. In response, his lawyers — what else! — tried to invoke the fifth amendment and said that their client could not do anything that placed him in danger of self-incrimination.
