A former Google engineer, Anthony Levandowski, has been ordered to pay $179 million to Google by a San Francisco county court over a contract dispute. The ruling upholds the award Google previously won in arbitration over an agreement that Levandowski would not poach employees.
Levandowski has since filed for bankruptcy protection claiming he had less than $100 million in personal assets. Google once paid Levandowski a $120 million bonus.
The judgment against Levandowski centered on his employment agreement with Google, which included not holding confidential information and not engaging in “any other employment, occupation or consulting directly related to” any businesses Google was working on. Another contract covering Google’s acquisition of two of Levandowski’s companies stipulated that he would not try to “encourage, induce [or] solicit” any Google employee to leave the company.
Waymo, previously known as Google’s self-driving car project, alleged that Levandowski downloaded thousands of confidential files to a personal hard drive before resigning from the company. Levandowski then launched a self-driving truck company, Otto, which Uber purchased in 2016.
According to Reuters, Levandowski, a key engineer in Google’s self-driving project and also the former head of Uber Technologies Inc’s self-driving technology unit, along with his colleague Lior Ron, engaged in unfair competition and breached their legal obligations by starting a rival company and bringing over Google employees, an arbitration panel ruled in December.
Uber, which later acquired the startup co-founded by Levandowski, indemnifies workers under its employment agreements. But Uber has said in financial filings that it expects to challenge paying the big judgment against its ex-employee Levandowski, who is fighting a federal indictment on charges of stealing trade secrets from Google.
