The Judge In The Waymo VS. Uber Case Is Not Fucking Around

Uber has taken some serious flak over the last 48 hours for its effort to move its high-profile legal battle with Waymo into arbitration. But the judge overseeing the case, William Alsup, says both parties are over-redacting pleadings like crazy and that he is "not going to put up with it."

"If we're going to be in a public proceeding 99 percent ... has got to be in public," Alsup said in a private hearing held Thursday, where it emerged that the engineer at the center of the case, Anthony Levandowski, could face criminal charges.

Alsup's fashioned himself in the case as a judge committed to transparency, chastising attorneys in the case for being too secretive. The 41-page transcript of Thursday's hearing obtained by Jalopnik emphasizes that portrayal in several instances. Take this bit, toward the end of the 50-minute hearing, when Uber's counsel tries to persuade Alsup to keep the hearing under seal.

"I think that's very prejudicial to us, to Uber, because we're not asserting the Fifth Amendment," Uber's attorney said. "We want [Levandowski] to testify. I want to be real clear about that. We would love for him to testify."

Alsup responded:

Okay. The public will read what you just said. I'm sorry, but the public's right to know what goes on in the federal courts is more important than the newspapers beating up on you in the press.

Alsup isn't fucking around!

And in an extended overture that took aim at Waymo, Alsup said he might consider punting the case to arbitration if Google's self-driving car project doesn't wise up and stop redacting the shit out of their pleadings.

The best thing—if it were—one of the factors that you ought to be considering is maybe you should—if you want all this stuff to be so secret, you should be in arbitration. You shouldn't be trying to do this in court and constantly telling them not to, or you putting in—the public has a right to see what we do.

And I feel that so strongly. I am not—the U.S. District Court is not a wholly owned subsidiary of Quinn Emanuel or Morrison & Foerster or these two big companies. We belong to the public.

And if this continues, then several things are going to happen. One, we're going to call a halt to the whole—we're going to stop everything. And we're going to have document-by-document hearings in this room, where I go through every document and you justify to me why we're there. And then after we sort it all out, we will resume. And, of course, I'll make 90 percent of those public. We will then resume. And your motion for preliminary injunction will be delayed day by day until we get this done.

You have a very strong incentive to stop this nonsense with the redactions.

And in one whack at Uber, Alsup chided the attorneys, after they revealed that Levandowski—for now—plans to plead the Fifth to avoid self-incrimination, and that they're struggling to locate the 14,000 self-driving car files that Levandowski allegedly stole before abruptly leaving Waymo to launch his self-driving truck start-up, Otto. (Otto was purchased last August by Uber for $680 million.)

If your guy is involved in criminal activity and has to have criminal lawyers of the caliber of these two gentlemen, who are the best, well, okay they got the best. But it's a problem I can't solve for you. And if you think I'm going to cut you some slack because you're looking at—your guy is looking at jail time, no.

They [Waymo] are going to get the benefit of their record. And if you don't deny it—if all you do is come in and say, "We looked for the documents and can't find them," then the conclusion is they got a record that shows Mr. Levandowski took it, and maybe still has it. And he's—he's still working for your company. And maybe that means preliminary injunction time. Maybe. I don't know. I'm not there yet.

But I'm telling you, you're looking at a serious problem.

The entire transcript is below, if you're interested in perusing. Take a look.