"[...] the Court first states its strong concern that the memorandum in support of the motion to compel is overly redacted. Our federal courts belong to the public, and the public and the press have a legitimate interest in looking over our shoulders to see the work in progress in our courts. The essence of our work concerns evaluating competing arguments. Parties should not hide those arguments under seal out of a desire to shroud business dealings in secrecy. [...] This theme runs throughout the brief history of this case. Please do not claim privacy over anything less than true trade secrets or other material clearly deserving to be under seal."
Sounds like this and many other conflicts Google had with Mr. Lewandowsky over the years should have been dealt with in arbitration. This just looks like Google acting out a vendetta against Mr. Lewandowsky. They tolerated his actions when he worked for them and even after he left to work for himself, but turned against him once he joined a competitor.
While on paper, it doesn't appear that Mr. Lewandowsky is a saint, Google doesn't look good here either. Google's behavior here should give any engineer pause about considering Google as a place to work. California doesn't allow non-compete agreements, and this looks like Google attempting to achieve the effects of a non-compete through litigation. "If we can't hire and keep Mr. Lewandowsky, then we'll make sure our competitors can't either."
Is there some sort of bizarro universe version of Hacker News that has been publishing "Uber is an awesome place to work!" articles?
If you keep reading, they touch on that several times. It sounds like Uber's lawyers complained to the judge and Google complained "Hey, you didn't ask us first" and then the judge yelled at Uber.
It's complicated by the fact that there are multiple suits going on, both the public lawsuit and some sort of arbitration, and Google has different lawyers representing them for the others.
In the end of the transcript of the session the quote is from, Google was saying they were only trying to redact sensitive PII in the employment agreement (the document that they were arguing about) like name, address, salary, etc. and everyone was OK with that.
THE COURT: If you all keep insisting on redacting so much information, like -- and you're the guilty one on that, Mr. Verhoeven -- then arbitration looks better and better. Because I'm not going to put up with it. If we're going to be in a public proceeding, 99 percent of what -- 90 percent, anyway, has got to be public. [..]
THE COURT: The best thing -- if we were -- one of the factors that you ought to be considering is maybe you should -- if you want all this stuff to be so secret, you should be in arbitration. You shouldn't be trying to do this in court and constantly telling them not to, or you putting in -- the public has a right to see what we do. [..] And I feel that so strongly. I am not -- the U.S. District Court is not a wholly owned subsidiary of Quinn Emanuel or Morrison & Foerster or these two big companies. We belong to the public. And if this continues, then several things are going to happen. One, we're going to call a halt to the whole -- we're going to stop everything. And we're going to have document-by-document hearings in this room,