Uber Fires Anthony Levandowski, But That Doesn't Save It From Google's Waymo

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. “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. Advanced Lawyering Though Uber's decision to fire Levandowski will not shield it from Waymo's complaint, it is a sign of some high level lawyerly strategery.__ __Earlier this month, Judge Alsup demanded Uber produce a comprehensive record of its investigations into the Waymo matter by June 23, a gargantuan task that requires the legal team to dig up and organize every document and record related to Levandowski and the company’s own lidar projects.