14 DAY TRIAL // Anthony Levandowski, the Uber engineer that's at the heart of the company's largest lawsuit with Google, regarding allegedly stolen documents about self-driving cars, was just fired.
Uber is a company that has been under fire a lot for its sketchy corporate policies and its lack of action against appalling sexual harassment complaints. Yet, no one's been fired over the years, or at least not publicly. It seems, however, that the company has now dumped Levandowski.
The news was delivered to employees via a company-wide email written by Angela Padilla, Uber Associate General Counsel, the New York Times reports.
"Over the last few months Uber has provided significant evidence to the court to demonstrate that our self-driving technology has been built independently. Over that same period, Uber has urged Anthony to fully cooperate in helping the court get to the fact and ultimately helping to prove our case," the email reads.
Uber is pretty much blaming Levandowski for his own firing, saying that the company had been trying to get him to comply with an internal investigation into the situation, but he let the deadline pass without action.
His termination is effective immediately.
A sensitive lawsuit
Uber has been fighting with Google's Waymo for some months now. Levandowski, a man who had previously worked for Google's own self-driving car, allegedly stole documents from the company before quitting and starting Otto, his own company. Otto was acquired in August 2016 by Uber.
According to the lawsuit, one of the main things Levandowski took with him were the machine drawings of the LiDAR circuit board. In total, some 14,000 confidential documents were mentioned in the court documents, adding up to nearly 10 GB of files, trade secrets, blueprints, design files and testing documentation.