Uber Fired Its Robocar Guru, But Its Legal Fight With Google Goes On

On Tuesday Uber fired Anthony Levandowski, the engineer at the center of its legal battle with Waymo, Google's self-driving car company. Uber said Levandowski failed to cooperate with the company's internal investigation into allegations asserted in a lawsuit Waymo brought against Uber: mainly, that Levandowski, who previously worked at Google and spent years working on the company's robocar effort, stole reams of intellectual property before he quit in early 2016, and that when he joined Uber six months later, used the illicit know-how to advance his new employer's technology. "This is not a positive development for Uber," says John Marsh, an attorney with the law firm Bailey Cavalieri who specializes in trade secret litigation. "In a perfect world, they would have been able to persuade Levandowski to come clean and demonstrate that there's nothing there"--that he didn't take 14,000 documents full of IP, that Uber did proper due diligence while hiring a competitor's former employee, and that no Waymo intellectual property made its way into Uber's self-driving tech, as Waymo's bombshell lawsuit has alleged. The severance caps off what must be an exceedingly uncomfortable few months for both Levandowski and Uber.