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April 11, 2017 

Honorable William Alsup 

U.S. District Court 

Northern District of California 

Courtroom 8 - 19th Floor 

450 Golden Gate Avenue 

San Francisco, CA 94102 

Re: Waymo LLC v. Uber Technologies, Inc. et al., 

Case No. 3:17-cv-00939 

Dear Judge Alsup: 

Defendants Uber Technologies, Inc., Ottomotto LLC, and Otto Trucking LLC (collectively 

“Uber”) submit this letter requesting relief related to this Court’s April 6 Order After Hearing 

Re Discovery Letter Dated April 3, 2017. (ECF No. 163 (“Order”).) 

The Order directs that by Friday at 5 p.m. Uber must: 1) use Waymo’s 15 additional search 

terms and the 50 priority filenames to search all previously-searched custodians; 2) use 

Waymo’s 15 search terms and defendants’ prior search terms to search ten additional 

custodians of Waymo’s choosing, 3) use Waymo’s 15 additional search terms and 

defendants’ prior search terms to search the computers and custodial data of any custodians 

that have anything to do with LiDAR technology (a total of 45 custodians), and 4) search all 

of defendants’ servers with LiDAR information for the 14,000 filenames as well as the 

search terms. 

Uber will complete the first requirement by the Friday deadline. It produced hits for the 

50 priority filenames on March 31. It has searched emails and attachments from the initial 

ten custodians, reviewed 69,864, and found that none are responsive. Uber extracted 

1,951,895 other (non-email) documents from these ten custodians’ data and made 51,079 

additional documents available for review yesterday. More documents will follow. Uber is 

on track to complete review of those additional documents and produce responsive 

documents, if any, by the Friday deadline. 

Uber cannot complete the second requirement, for the simple reason that Uber asked Waymo 

for its list of ten priority custodians on April 6, (Exhibit 1), and Waymo never responded. 

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Honorable William Alsup 

April 11, 2017 

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As to the third requirement, Uber is continuing to search the data of additional custodians, 

but the problems extracting documents for Uber custodians using Google’s G Suite 

applications, coupled with Waymo’s broad search terms, make it impossible to comply with 

the Friday deadline. Based on the number of documents identified from the initial ten 

custodians, the total number of documents for the remaining 45 custodians could be in the 

millions. 

As to the fourth requirement, Uber’s servers contain over 106.5 terabytes of data. (Exhibit 2, 

Faulkner Decl., ¶ 5.) This is the equivalent of over 10.9 billion pages of email data. (Id.) 

This amount of data cannot be collected, processed, and reviewed by the Friday deadline. 

Modification of a discovery order requires a showing of good cause. See, e.g., Johnson v. 

Mammoth Recreations, Inc., 975 F.2d 604, 609 (9th Cir. 1992); Mitchell v. Jones, No. 1:11-

cv-00099-LJO-GSA-PC, 2015 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 79275, at *3-4 (E.D. Cal. June 18, 2015). 

To establish good cause, the party seeking the modification of an order must generally show 

that even with the exercise of due diligence, they cannot meet the requirement of the order. 

See Johnson, 975 F.2d at 609. Uber has shown good cause for the relief it seeks here. 

Problematic Collection of Google Drive Documents and Waymo’s Broad Search Terms 

Uber relies on cloud storage and remote hosted computing environments, including the 

Google G Suite, for much of its server infrastructure. (Exhibit 2 ¶¶ 7-9.) Accordingly, the 

custodians at issue in this case have documents from applications like Gmail, Google 

Calendar, Google Docs, and Google Drive. (Id.) Uber’s digital forensic vendor Stroz 

Friedberg has had particular challenges with the collection of data from Google Drive. (Id.) 

Because Google Drive’s in-application searching capabilities cannot handle the searches 

necessary here, Stroz must download the data from Drive for each custodian. (Id. at ¶ 8.)

That has resulted in the collection and processing of an enormous amount of data. For 

example, the volume of Google Drive data for the first 10 custodians was over 600 

gigabytes. (Id.) Stroz estimates that it could take one to two weeks to search and collect data 

from Drive for the remaining custodians, even if Google’s tech support is able to help Uber 

find an in-application solution. (Id.) If the in-application searching methods continue to fail 

and Stroz needs to download data for all in-scope custodians, this process could take as long 

as a month. (Id.) 

These collection problems are compounded by Waymo’s unreasonably broad search terms, 

such as “Fuji.” (Exhibit 3.) “Fuji” is the code name of Uber ATG’s in-house mid-range 

LiDAR solution. (ECF No. 177 at 5:5-7.) With terms that are completely untethered from 

the documents they should be seeking to identify, it is unsurprising that tens of thousands of 

search term hits have been reviewed and none are responsive. 

Case 3:17-cv-00939-WHA Document 210 Filed 04/11/17 Page 2 of 3
Honorable William Alsup 

April 11, 2017 

Page Three 

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Uber has called and emailed Waymo’s counsel to discuss narrowing the search terms (e.g., 

Exhibit 4) and to use a better-tailored agreed on method for searching (e.g., Exhibit 5), but 

Waymo has ignored Uber’s request. 

Participation by Forensic Vendors to More Efficiently Identify Responsive Documents 

While working diligently on the collection, processing, and review of search term hits, Uber 

has also repeatedly requested that the parties allow their forensic vendors to help develop a 

plan and employ tools to search Uber’s systems more effectively. To date, Waymo has 

refused any such efforts. 

To initiate that discussion, Uber requested that Stroz be allowed to inspect the 14,000 files 

with certain tools in order to help improve Uber’s searching. (See Exhibit 6.) Among other 

things, the tools would allow Uber to see file headers, review the contents at the disk-level, 

and generate fuzzy hashes. (Id.) Waymo repeatedly rejected that request, including when 

Uber’s analyst from Stroz went to inspect the files on April 7. (Id.) On Saturday, April 8, 

Waymo finally relented and Stroz spent a day using forensic tools to analyze the 14,000 files. 

(Id.) Stroz was able to create certain lists—including fuzzy and block hash lists—which 

were provided to Waymo’s counsel. (Id.) These fuzzy and block hash lists will allow Uber’s 

forensics team to search for files that are like the ones allegedly stolen more efficiently and 

accurately. (Id.) 

In conjunction with Stroz’s inspection and to leverage its findings, Uber requested that both 

parties’ forensic vendors participate in a meet and confer regarding how to more efficiently 

search Uber’s systems. Dealing with challenging e-discovery tasks and employing 

sophisticated searching tools is the precise purview of forensic vendors. The volume of false 

hits so far, and the time projection to extract further documents, confirm that the current 

method of searching is unworkable. Continuing with Waymo’s overbroad search terms is 

not the best way to accomplish the mutual goal here: to locate and return Waymo material, if 

any. Accordingly, Uber requests that the Court relieve Uber of the Friday deadline and order 

the parties’ forensic experts and counsel to meet and confer and agree on a streamlined 

search methodology. 

Respectfully submitted, 

/s/ Arturo J. González 

Arturo J. González 

Counsel for Uber Technologies, Inc., Ottomotto LLC and Otto Trucking LLC 

cc: Counsel of record (via email) 

Case 3:17-cv-00939-WHA Document 210 Filed 04/11/17 Page 3 of 3