SAN FRANCISCO — A federal judge on Tuesday delayed a highly anticipated trade secrets trial between Waymo, Alphabet’s self-driving car unit, and Uber, a day before jury selection was set to begin.
Judge William Alsup of US District Court in San Francisco said a letter written by a lawyer for Richard Jacobs, a former Uber employee, which surfaced last week, contradicted earlier statements by Uber’s lawyers, forcing him to delay the trial until Waymo’s lawyers could gather more information.
The letter, along with Jacobs’s testimony on Tuesday, provided a window into a secretive operation inside Uber that collected intelligence on competitors while going to considerable lengths to cover its tracks.
“I can no longer trust the words of the lawyers for Uber in this case,’’ Alsup said. He added, “If even half of what is in that letter is true, it would be an injustice for Waymo to go to trial.’’
The US attorney’s office in Northern California alerted the court to the letter, written by Jacobs’ lawyer to Angela Padilla, deputy general counsel at Uber. Uber hired Jacobs in March 2016 as its manager of global intelligence and fired him in April of this year, Jacobs testified in court on Tuesday. He is now a paid security consultant for Uber.
In discussions with other Uber employees, Jacobs testified, he learned of an internal organization that gathered trade secrets, code, and other information about its competitors. It was called the “marketplace analytics team,’’ according to the letter. The group frequented the code-sharing site GitHub, searching for private material that may have been accidentally revealed by competitors.
This Uber team also led efforts “to evade, impede, obstruct, influence several ongoing lawsuits against Uber,’’ according to the letter from Jacobs’ lawyer. The team also tried to find out what other companies were doing. In 2016, Uber hired a man named Ed Russo to help recruit employees of competitors to steal trade secrets, according to the letter.
This group relied on “anonymous’’ servers separate from the rest of the Uber network, and some employees were expected to rely on devices that encrypted or automatically deleted messages after a certain amount of time, Jacobs testified. Email was a last resort.
This system, Jacobs said in his testimony, “was to ensure there was no paper trail that would come back to haunt the company in any criminal or civil litigation.’’
Jacobs said Tuesday that this effort focused solely on overseas competitors and that he was not aware of the unit obtaining trade secrets from Waymo or other competitors in the United States. That contradicted an assertion in his letter, which said he was aware that this team had at least stolen trade secrets from Waymo.
Waymo sued Uber in February, claiming that a former engineer for Waymo, Anthony Levandowski, conspired with Uber to steal Waymo trade secrets. Waymo said Levandowski downloaded more than 14,000 confidential files from company servers before leaving the Google unit and eventually joining the autonomous vehicle project at Uber.
The involvement of the US attorney’s office is a peculiar twist, since federal prosecutors do not usually get involved in civil trials between two companies. The inclusion of the letter suggests that federal authorities discovered it during their own investigation into Uber’s business practices.
What investigation the US attorney’s office is conducting is unclear. A spokesman for the office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
This is not the first time the US attorney’s office has been involved in the case. Earlier in the year, Alsup, citing what he said was compelling evidence against Levandowski connected to the theft of trade secrets, referred the matter to federal authorities.
In May, Uber fired Levandowski after he failed to turn over evidence related to the suit, citing his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself.
