Self-driving cars company Waymo and cab-hailing service provider Uber seem to be headed toward an ugly legal battle. After dragging Uber to court over its partnership with Waymo’s former employee Anthony Levandowski, who it alleges stole crucial trade secrets before exiting the company, and more recently, pushing for a delay in trail, the autonomous car developer has demanded damages to the tune of $2.6 billion, and that’s just for starters.
Judge William Alsup who is presiding over the case allowed Uber’s lawyer to disclose that Waymo had sought $2.6 billion as the maximum value of damages in lieu of the series of stole trade secrets. In a tense exchange before the revelation, Waymo’s lawyer took time to decide whether to argue that the number be kept private on grounds that the documents pertaining to the value were marked attorneys’ eyes only.
There are a total of nine such trade secrets in question but there is no fresh information on whether Uber’s culpability in using these allegedly stolen secrets has been established. Apart from this big revelation on the astronomical figure demanded by Waymo, much of Wednesday’s hearing focused on whether the company should be granted a Motion to Continue for delaying the trial. Waymo’s legal team was at the receiving end of Judge Alsup’s criticism for its failure to trim down the case in order to accommodate reasonable court schedules.
Waymo, for its part, has maintained that the extra time would help it examine new evidence in the case. Throwing light on the volume of new evidence, Waymo’s legal team claimed that Levandowski took 64,000 images of the proprietary information. It is believed that these images or screenshots were smart tactics for maintaining access to the company’s trade secrets without being in possession of original files. On these grounds, the lawyers are pushing for the trail to commence from December 5 instead of October 10 and be concluded in two weeks instead of the proposed three-week span.
Uber’s lawyers, however, maintain that this is just a ploy on Waymo’s part to stall the legal proceedings and use this time to swap or even introduce new trade secrets to the trial. Judge Alsup is expected to give a decision on whether or not the trial will be delayed on October 3. For now, he has asked both parties to prepare, hinting at the possibility that the trial may not be delayed after all.
Source: TechCrunch
