During a pair of explosive pre-trial hearings last week, the lawsuit between self-driving Alphabet spinoff Waymo and Uber over trade secrets got an unlikely, new star player. It wasn't an engineer, like Anthony Levadowski, the former Google engineer who allegedly brought reams of Waymo trade secrets to his next big gig as head of autonomous driving at Uber. It wasn't a security analyst, like Ric Jacobs, a former Uber employee whose allegations of malfeasance within the company delayed the Uber-Waymo trial by two months as the judge reopened the document discovery process. It was a messaging app. Anybody can download Wickr to send encrypted messages that destroy themselves, but its professional, workplace product takes the extra step of giving the employers the power to determine how long the messages stick around before it deletes them.

SAN FRANCISCO – Top executives at Uber Technologies Inc. used the encrypted chat app Wickr to hold secret conversations, current and former workers testified in court this week, setting up what could be the first major legal test of the issues raised by the use of encrypted apps inside companies. The revelations Tuesday and Wednesday about the extensive use of Wickr inside Uber upended the high-stakes legal showdown with Alphabet Inc.'s Waymo unit, which accuses the ride-hailing firm of stealing its self-driving-car secrets. There is nothing inherently unlawful about instructing employees to use disappearing messaging apps, said Timothy Heaphy, a lawyer at Hunton & Williams and a former U.S. attorney in Virginia. However, companies have an obligation to preserve records that may be reasonably seen as relevant to litigation or that fall under data retention rules set by industry regulators. In Uber's situation, chat logs that could help get to the bottom of the trade secrets case are now inaccessible.