Another blow for Uber in its legal battle against Waymo

Uber was ordered by Magistrate Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley on Thursday to hand over the unredacted term sheet of its agreement with Otto to Waymo. The judge said there was no basis for Uber to censor parts of the document because there was no privileged information shared with Otto prior to the acquisition and the cab-aggregator was given the time until end of the day to do the same.

Waymo's next target is due diligence report conducted ahead of the Otto acquisition which it believes can shed light on a lot of the questions Anthony Levandowski has refused to answer exercising his Fifth Amendment rights. But Uber is arguing that it can't turn over diligence report as it is protected by attorney-client privilege.

Meanwhile, Levandowski is now required to submit privilege logs justifying his assertion of the Fifth Amendment again. 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,” Alsup wrote. “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.”

Things are surely getting tough for Levandowski who was notified by his current employer last week to either deny that he downloaded and took any documents from Google, or to hand over the documents to Google. While he has already been barred from working on any projects related to LiDAR technology, non-compliance of above orders could have him fired from the company itself.