With jury selection now underway, both sides are laying out their core arguments on trade secrets, R&D provenance, and Anthony Levandowski's role — a framing that will be tested publicly after Waymo's attempt to seal large portions of the proceedings drew opposition from major news organizations including NYT, WSJ, and Gizmodo.
First-order effects
A jury will now weigh Waymo's claim that Levandowski stole trade secrets against Uber's argument that Alphabet's real grievance is the Otto acquisition and the Levandowski hire — with Uber's ability to keep operating autonomous vehicles on the line via Waymo's still-pending injunction request.
The trial forces both companies to argue their R&D history in open court, after the media coalition's brief succeeded in keeping portions of the proceedings unsealed.
Second-order effects
If the jury finds Uber liable, the injunction Waymo sought in March 2017 becomes far harder for the court to deny, directly threatening Uber's autonomous vehicle program at its most advanced stage.
A Waymo win would hand every self-driving competitor a template for suing over poached engineering teams, raising the legal price of aggressive talent raids across the industry.
Third-order effects
The case is shaping up as the structural test of whether hiring a rival's star engineer legally transfers their knowledge — if courts treat it as it did here, autonomous vehicle firms will need to firewall new hires from prior employers' data as a standard compliance function.
Public, unsealed adjudication of these claims sets a precedent for how much of future AI litigation happens in view of competitors, regulators, and press rather than behind protective orders.
The trend: Autonomous vehicle competition is shifting from talent raids to courtrooms, with the Waymo-Uber jury verdict set to define how much of an engineer's knowledge travels with them.
“To repeat, the central issue in this case remains whether or not Uber misappropriated Waymo's trade secrets, not whether or not Uber is an evil corporation.” #UberWaymo pic.twitter.com/d8qAJtarnr
In the meantime, an order that came through last night says Waymo can't use the Jacobs letter (letter that alleged Uber surveilled individuals/competitors) in trial except for parts that could have a bearing on this case such as use of ephemeral messaging pic.twitter.com/rQU881IM…
Alsup is much less forgiving on Uber's possible spoilation of evidence. But he will withhold instructing jury to draw adverse inferences until he's seen evidence presented at the trial. pic.twitter.com/N4WMah9oic
On the surface, the upcoming trial between Uber and Waymo is about trade secrets — but it might have bigger implications on how talent moves from company to company in Silicon Valley. https://www.nytimes.com/... pic.twitter.com/tnREt2UnUT
The Jacobs Letter — which caused a major delay in the case until today — is not admissable in the case, except for impeachment and contradicting Ric Jacobs testify if he's called https://www.forbes.com/... pic.twitter.com/y71y1FP0HV
Alsup will instruct the jury that Uber failed to disclose some timely info about Levandowski supposedly destroying discs and a comms log, but won't instruct it to draw any adverse conclusions.
Jury selection is an important signal because we'll get to see how technical the jury we'll be. If they're less technical, more of the case might be about the dramatic story of Anthony Levandowski arriving at Uber rather than the nuts and bolts of Lidar units #UberWaymo
Alsup tells the jurors they can go change their Facebook privacy settings so the press can't snoop on them. “There's something called friends of friends...”