As Jury Is Seated, Judge Says Waymo Trial Won't Be on Uber's Litigation Conduct
U.S. District Judge William Alsup's jovial, reverential tone with the jurors on Wednesday stood in contrast to an order made public late Tuesday night dealing with a flood of Waymo motions alleging misconduct by Uber during the course of the litigation.
January 31, 2018 at 06:15 PM
4 minute read
At a marathon court session Wednesday morning, lawyers for Waymo and Uber chose a jury of six men and four women from around the Bay Area to decide their knockdown-dragout autonomous vehicle trade-secret case.
The jury of 10 will be charged with deciding whether Uber acquired and used any of the eight trade secrets allegedly misappropriated from Waymo—and whether they are due any protection in the first place. The jury includes an immigrant from Azerbaijan who works as a software tester, an Air Force veteran who works at Veterans Administration in San Francisco, and a Concord woman who manages respiratory therapy at a local hospital.
In court Wednesday morning, a group of 16 potential jurors were cleared from a pool of 65 candidates before each company's lawyer—Charles Verhoeven of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan for Waymo and Arturo González of Morrison & Foerster for Uber—took turns using three strikes to form the final jury.
Among Waymo's final strikes from the jury pool was a manager at PG&E who had a history of working in startups, a software engineer at a North Bay fintech company, and a woman with an advanced biology degree who had researched the name of the case on the online calendar for U.S. District Judge William Alsup of the Northern District of California, who is overseeing the case.
Uber used its strikes to excuse a man who works for a Livermore semiconductor supply chain company who read about the case on Google News, a self-employed professional writing teacher from Pleasant Hill, and a woman who works in medical records who, as luck would have it, told the judge that she had a summons for criminal jury duty in state court in San Francisco starting Monday morning—the day the trial is set to push off in Waymo v. Uber.
Alsup joked with the woman that the competing federal and state jury summonses could be an “interesting constitutional argument” that could make its way all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, before promising her he would take care of the issue should she be seated.
Alsup's jovial and, at times, reverential tone with the jurors stood in stark contrast to an order he made public late Tuesday night dealing with a flood of Waymo motions alleging misconduct by Uber during the course of the litigation. Alsup turned back most of Google's requests for sanctions and jury instructions regarding Uber's litigation conduct, finding that most were an overreach.
“Yes, buried in the complex of motions and supplements lurk some legitimate criticisms of Uber and its counsel,” Alsup wrote. “But it also must be said that Waymo has whined—often without good reason—at every turn in this case, making it hard to separate the wheat from the chaff.”
Alsup, however, did indicate he will instruct jurors that Uber failed to timely disclose that former Google engineer Anthony Levandowski destroyed five disks containing Google information after discussing them with Uber officials, and that Uber repeatedly supplemented its log of communications Levandowski had with others about Lidar—the laser technology used to help autonomous cars “see” their surroundings—after court-ordered deadlines.
“It bears repeating that neither side in this contentious litigation has been above using exaggeration, spin, or other misleading rhetorical flourishes to advance their cause,” Alsup wrote. “If the court were to issue an adverse inference instruction for every time that a lawyer for either side, including Waymo, told a half-truth, the merits of this case would never see the light of day.”
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