Judge orders Uber to hand over to Waymo unredacted term sheet with Otto
Megan Rose Dickey / TechCrunch :
Context & Ripple Effects
This order is an early skirmish in what became a grinding discovery war in Waymo's trade secrets suit against Uber over Otto. The court kept peeling back Uber's confidentiality shields through 2017: by September, the appeals court had refused Uber's bid to move the case into private arbitration and forced production of the Otto acquisition diligence file, which was later made public.
The unredacted term sheet matters because it is the financial skeleton of the Otto deal — exactly the material Waymo needs to argue Uber knew what it was buying. The pressure cut both ways: a magistrate judge also ordered Waymo to disclose its deal with Lyft to Uber, and by November the district judge said Uber had withheld evidence from him, pushing the trial back.
First-order effects
- Uber must give Waymo the full Otto term sheet, losing redactions it had used to keep deal economics out of its rival's hands — and out of the public record.
- Waymo gains direct visibility into what Uber paid for and promised Otto's team, sharpening its claim that Uber acquired self-driving know-how of contested provenance.
Second-order effects
- With the term sheet unsealed, media organizations already fighting to keep the trial open — Gizmodo, NYT, WSJ — gain a concrete document to demand access to, raising the reputational stakes for Uber beyond the courtroom.
- The mutual-discovery pattern (Waymo's Lyft terms exposed in return) forces both companies to weigh how much of their partnership strategy they will air rather than settle quietly.
Third-order effects
- If courts keep treating acquisition diligence as discoverable evidence, startup M&A in sensitive technical fields carries a litigation tail risk: the buyer's own files become exhibits against it years later.
- The escalating sanctions track — withheld evidence, delayed trial, forced disclosures — points toward trade secrets disputes being decided by discovery conduct as much as by the underlying technology claims.
The trend: Autonomous-vehicle competition is increasingly litigated through forced disclosure of deal documents, making discovery rulings — not just patents or demos — the battleground between Waymo and Uber.