Letter From Ex-Uber Employee's Lawyer Describes Targeted Trade Secret Theft, Discovery Evasion

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Screenshot of the letter a lawyer for ex-Uber employee Richard Jacobs sent to in-house lawyer Angela Padilla[/caption] SAN FRANCISCO — A 37-page letter written by a lawyer for an ex-Uber employee that makes incendiary accusations about the company surveiling and ripping off competitors was made public on Friday by the judge presiding over Waymo’s trade secrets lawsuit. The letter, written by Minneapolis-based whistleblower attorney Clayton Halunen on behalf of former Uber security analyst Richard Jacobs, alleges that Uber ran clandestine operations aimed at stealing competitors’ trade secret information—including Waymo’s. It also specifically accuses Uber of seeking to evade “current and future discovery requests, court orders, and government investigations in violation of state and federal law as well as ethical rules governing the legal profession.” The letter was originally sent to Uber in-house attorney Angela Padilla in May this year. Padilla later testified that she believed it was an attempt to squeeze money from Uber by Jacobs, and that she had turned the letter over to federal prosecutors in order to “take the air out of his extortionist balloon.” (Uber reached a settlement with Jacobs, who resigned but was facing termination, for a total amount of $7.5 million—$3 million of which went to Halunen.) The letter was disclosed in the civil trade secrets case after prosecutors took the rare step of turning it over to U.S. District Judge William Alsup of the Northern District of California, who had referred the case to the local U.S. Attorney’s office in light of the trade secret theft claims. Earlier Friday, a court-appointed special master concluded in a report that Uber should have turned over the letter itself in the context of discovery in the civil litigation. In response to the letter’s unsealing Friday, Uber spokesman Matt Kallman said in a statement: “While we haven’t substantiated all the claims in this letter—and, importantly, any related to Waymo—our new leadership has made clear that going forward we will compete honestly and fairly, on the strength of our ideas and technology.” After the letter was brought into the civil case, Jacobs subsequently walked back the accusations about the Uber stealing Waymo’s trade secrets specifically and said that he had only reviewed the lengthy letter written by Halunen briefly. In a section beginning on page 13, under a bolded subhead that reads “Waymo,” the letter says Jacobs heard an account from another Uber employee suggesting that the company had gone to great lengths to keep its pending acquisition of Ottomotto secret. Ottomotto is the self-driving car company started by Anthony Levandowski, a former senior Waymo engineer. The section also says Uber employees arranged a training session in Pittsburgh “on ephemeral communications, non-attributable devices, and false attorney-client privilege designations with the specific intent of preventing the discovery of devices, documents, and communications in anticipated litigation.” “These facts corroborate Google's legal theory in pending litigation that Otto was simply a shell company whose sole purpose was to dissemble Uber's conspiracy to steal Waymo's intellectual property,” the letter adds. The letter also accuses Uber employees of fraudulently impersonating riders and drivers on competitor platforms, hacking into competitor networks, and surreptitiously recording private conversations of other companies' executives.