Judge Tells Uber Lawyer: ‘It Looks Like You Covered This Up’<br />The company did share the letter from Mr. Jacobs’s lawyer with three different United States attorney offices, because Mr. Jacobs had threatened to take his claims to federal prosecutors<br />and Uber wanted to “take the air out of his extortionist balloon,” Ms. Padilla testified.<br />The judge, William Alsup, delayed the start of the trial on Tuesday — one day before jury selection was supposed to begin — after the United States attorney’s<br />office in Northern California alerted him to the existence of the letter, written by the lawyer for a former Uber employee to one of the company’s lawyers.<br />The letter that caused the trial to be delayed was written by a lawyer for Richard Jacobs, a former<br />employee in Uber’s security team, to Angela Padilla, the company’s deputy general counsel.<br />Nonetheless, Uber paid a $3 million settlement to the lawyer who wrote the letter in addition to the $4.5 million paid to Mr. Jacobs.<br />After Mr. Jacobs left Uber, his lawyer sent the 37-page letter to Ms. Padilla as part of settlement negotiations in May.<br />Ms. Padilla said the company had not shared this letter with the legal team handling the Waymo case<br />because Uber hadn’t wanted to compromise an internal investigation into its claims.<br />On Wednesday, two current Uber security employees denied many of the allegations in the 37-page letter<br />and claims by Mr. Jacobs in his testimony on Tuesday.
