Uber Trained Employees on How To 'Impede, Obstruct or Influence' Ongoing Legal Investigations, Ex-employee Says (cnbc.com)

From a report on CNBC: Uber faced fresh allegations on Tuesday that it deliberately took steps to keep " unlawful schemes from seeing the light of day." Hours of testimony on Tuesday centered around a letter from a former Uber security analyst's attorney to an Uber lawyer. The former analyst, Richard Jacobs, said in the letter there was a directive for Uber employees to use disappearing chat apps like Wickr, and that Uber sent employees to Pittsburgh (where it's developing its autonomous vehicles) to "educate" them on how to prevent "Uber's unlawful schemes from seeing the light of day." He reportedly made other bombshell allegations in the letter, including that employees at Uber were trained to "impede" ongoing investigations, multiple media outlets reported.

Comments

Shades of gray

[Lije Baley]

Other companies do this, just not in so many words. Aside from the nudging and winking policies, some things are done under overt, yet bogus reasons. My company now deletes virtually all email after 3 months, to better manage storage resources and adhere to best practices for retention.

Maybe...

[swillden]

I'm not a fan of Uber as a company. They've done a lot of shady crap. But this sounds like it could also be normal corporate "speaking with care" training. Every company I've ever worked for has told me to be cautious with communicating about legally-sensitive topics in writing (including email and chat systems that archive conversations). Said training usually includes information about how to specify that written communication is attorney-client privileged, too, which makes it non-discoverable in most legal proceedings, plus a recommendation that if you're in doubt, you should hold your conversation in person or over the phone (or video conference).

This is just normal stuff. Sure, it could be used to avoid leaving documentary evidence of illegal dealings, but that's not its intent. Its intent is to avoid generating large amounts of documentation that has to be reviewed in discovery, and which could be exploited by opposing counsel by mischaracterizing it or taking it out of context. For individual employees, it also tends to keep them out of the line of fire of subpoenas. If you mentioned a topic in discoverable communications, you're likely to get subpoenaed to give a deposition.

It should be noted that if you're actually doing something illegal, and if your attorney is unethical enough to advise you on how to get away with it, the training shouldn't tell you to use any chat apps, or phone calls, etc., because there's always a chance that an investigation is already under way and that the communications medium is tapped. If you're committing crime, "speaking with care" recommendations are not good enough.