SAN FRANCISCO (CN) — A federal judge Wednesday was unmoved by accusations that he’d forced Uber to fire its star engineer Anthony Levandowski for refusing to deliver evidence that could prove Levandowski and Uber stole trade secrets from its driverless car rival Waymo.
The accusation came from Levandowski’s attorneys at a hearing on his motion to intervene in Waymo's lawsuit, accusing him and Uber of stealing its technology to build a competing self-driving car.
Levandowski sought to intervene to request modifications to a May 15 provisional relief order from U.S. District Judge William Alsup, to clarify that Alsup had not ordered Uber to fire him if he refused to waive his Fifth Amendment rights and produce key evidence in the case.
Alsup ruled from the bench that Levandowski's May 18 motion is moot, based on assurances from Uber attorney Karen Dunn that Uber fired Levandowski on its own initiative, not based on Alsup’s order.
Uber told Levandowski in a May 26 letter that it had fired him from his job leading Uber's driverless car program for not cooperating with its internal investigation into Waymo's allegations, and announced the firing publicly on May 30.
“I issued a very fine-tuned preliminary injunction order and I'm not going to take back one word on that,” Alsup said Wednesday.
Fearing criminal prosecution, Levandowski invoked his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination to avoid producing documents or answering questions about them at his deposition, a motion Alsup denied.
In his provisional relief order, Alsup directed Uber to make Levandowski return thousands of files he stole from Waymo before resigning to work for Uber, writing that Levandowki had likely concealed “troves” of self-incriminating evidence by invoking his Fifth Amendment rights. Earlier this week, U.S. Magistrate Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley ruled that a due diligence report purportedly related to the stolen files - which both Levandowski and Uber have fought to keep private under attorney-client and work product privilege - must be produced.
Waymo, a Google spinoff, says Levandowski downloaded 14,000 confidential files from its server just before he resigned in January 2016 to form a competing driverless car company called Otto, which Uber quickly acquired. The files include information on Waymo’s secret LiDAR system, a laser-based scanning and mapping technology its driverless cars use to “see” their surroundings.
Waymo sued Uber and Otto in February, claiming Levandowski used its technology to set up Otto, and that Uber snapped up Otto to get its hands on Waymo’s technology to fast-track its floundering driverless car program. It did not name Levandowski as a defendant.
On Wednesday, Levandowski’s attorney Miles Ehrlich told Alsup that his provisional relief order had forced Levandowski to choose between his job at Uber and waiving his Fifth Amendment rights, because it required Uber and Otto to “exercise the full extent of their corporate, employment, contractual, and other authority” to force Levandowski to produce the stolen files and tell Uber what he did with them after leaving Waymo.