Waymo v. Uber: After two trial delays, the case that's been gripping Silicon Valley finally got underway Monday.

SAN FRANCISCO — In a jam-packed courtroom early Monday morning, the lead attorney representing Waymo in its driverless car lawsuit against Uber launched into trial by casting Uber and ex-CEO Travis Kalanick as willing to do anything to win a fierce technological arms race.

The kickoff of the two-week trial in U.S. District Judge William Alsup's courtroom—after two previous delays—was the culmination of a year of furiously paced litigation between Waymo's team at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan's, and Uber's sprawling lineup of attorneys from Susman Godfrey, Boies Schiller Flexner, and Morrison & Foerster.

Shortly after 6:30 a.m., a snaking line wound down the hallway of the 19th floor of the Philipp Burton Federal Building, where Alsup's court is located. The court opened up an overflow room for observers and members of the press to accommodate the large crowd. Former federal prosecutors Melinda Haag and Walter Brown, now of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, were seen in the gallery; they are representing Kalanick in the case.

In his opening statement, Quinn Emanuel's Charles Verhoeven seized on the analogy of Rosie Ruiz, the woman who cheated to win the Boston marathon in 1980 by hopping on the subway to gain a time advantage, to make his point.

“This case is about two competitors, where one of the competitors decided they needed to win at all costs,” said Verhoeven, speaking to a jury of six men and four women. Kalanick, he said, made the decision to “cheat” in order to catch up with Waymo. “He decided to take the subway,” Verhoeven said.

Verhoeven also tried to build a warm, sympathetic image of Google, which Waymo spun out of in 2016. He showed a slide with icons for services such as Gmail and Google Docs. “All these services are free, all these services all make us have a better life,” he said. He also stressed the possible gains in traffic safety that could be brought about by driverless car technology.

'Conspiracy Theory'

Bill Carmody of Susman Godfrey, representing Uber, spent most of his opening statement trying to tear down whatever goodwill Verhoeven had built. He compared Waymo's case to a “conspiracy theory.”

“That was quite a story we just heard,” Carmody told the jury. “I want to tell you right up front it didn't happen that way. There's no conspiracy, there's no cheating—period, end of story.”

Both attorneys made use in their opening statements of an internal Google email sent by Sasha Zbrozek, who managed one of Waymo's file servers. In it, he appears to downplay the value of the 14,000 Waymo files allegedly taken by Anthony Levandowski, the star engineer who left Waymo to start a company later acquired by Uber.

“It was considered low-value enough that we had even considered hosting it off of Google infrastructure,” Zbrozek wrote in the email, dated October 2016, the month when Waymo said it first learned of the download.

Verhoeven tried to dismiss the email by saying that Zbrozek isn't an engineer with expertise in LiDAR, the laser technology at the heart of the case. He also said that “low-value” referred to the fact that the files didn't contain Google users' personal information. Here again, Verhoeven tried to cast Google in a benevolent light, telling the jury that the personal information of regular users is “more important even than our trade secrets.”

Carmody hit back, saying of the email: “You know it's bad when they've got to mention it in the openings to try and explain it away.”

The Susman attorney also underlined that Levandowski, who was fired last year by Uber, is not on trial in the case. With what looked like a LiDAR device in front of him, he told the jury: “Anthony Levandowski obviously did some things at Google that he shouldn't have done. But there's no connection whatsoever to all the files he downloaded … and what's in here.”