Getting Uber on the straight and narrow
Hard-hitting legal eagle hired to bring law and order to e-hailing service ahead of IPO
NOT long after Tony West joined
Uber as chief legal officer in
November 2017 he began a delicate task – crafting a transparency report to quantify how many people had been sexually assaulted on Uber rides.
The effort was part of West’s mandate to help clean up Uber, which was caught in legal entanglements, safety issues and a problematic workplace culture.
West directed Uber employees to work with the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, a nonprofit, to review 221 instances of sexual assault that occurred during rides in 2017. He listened to customer service calls, including one in which an Uber driver said he had raped a passenger. And the company began auditing past complaints to determine whether it had evidence of old assaults.
Nearly 16 months later, the work is far from over. “This is a hugely under-reported set of situations,”
West, 53, said.
Since Uber chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi brought in West, the attorney has swept aside many of its highest-profile legal woes.
However, the sexual assault transparency report, which West plans to release this year, underlines just how much more work Uber needs to do. “He is very upfront about the fact that it’s not going to be pretty,” Tammy Albarran, Uber’s deputy general counsel, said.
The work is especially important as Uber gears up for a highly-anticipated initial public offering (IPO).
Uber, which may go public at a $120 billion (R1.7bn) valuation, would dwarf its main rival in the US, Lyft, which is likely to begin trading on the stock market next month.
But to pull off a successful offering, the company must reduce its legal exposure and show that it has revamped its culture and cares about the safety of passengers.
West, a former Justice Department official and the brother-in-law of Senator Kamala Harris, the California Democrat who is running for president, said he was hitching his reputation to Uber and its changes.
In 2014, he became general counsel of Pepsico, where, he said, he learnt how to operate in a Fortune 50 company.
In 2017, Khosrowshahi came calling. Over several dinners in New York, he pitched West on the idea of turning Uber into a more self-critical company.
At Uber, West began rebuilding the legal department and confronted some urgent legal problems. They included a trial last year to defend the company against allegations that it had stolen trade secrets from Waymo in the race to build self-driving cars.
The weekend before the trial started that February, West met Waymo’s lawyers to settle the case. The conversation ended in an impasse. After the trial opened, embarrassing revelations about Uber quickly tumbled out. West said that he had texted Kevin Vosen, Waymo’s general counsel, from the courtroom and that the two had met during breaks to keep trying for a settlement. Four days after the trial began, the two sides struck a deal. Uber agreed to provide Waymo, which had sought $1bn in damages, with 0.34 percent of its stock, valued then at $245 million, as well as the right to inspect Uber’s self-driving technology.
At the same time, West worked to placate investigators who were digging into the 2016 data breach, which Uber had kept secret and which had prompted numerous state lawsuits for violation of data breach notification laws.
West said he had kept in frequent contact with Lisa Madigan, who was the Illinois attorney-general, to hash out a settlement.
Madigan said that being friends with West “in some ways makes it easier” to negotiate. “We both know the law, we both know the problem, and we both know there needs to be a resolution.”
In September, the two agreed that Uber would pay $148m to all 50 states to settle the data breach investigation.
West also worked with Khosrowshahi to change Uber’s culture.
Last year, he helped Uber settle a $10m pay discrimination lawsuit by three former female employees. And he helped settle a lawsuit by nine women who had been raped, kidnapped, assaulted or harassed by drivers.
Eric Holder, the former attorneygeneral who led an inquiry into
Uber’s workplace in 2017 and is friends with West, said of the company: “They still have work to do, but made really significant progress in a short period of time.”
Some of the work today revolves around the sexual assault transparency report. Uber is now training its customer service representatives to sort incidents into 21 categories. And because the company operates in 64 countries, the training must also be localised. That is tricky because of varied cultural norms, a kiss on the cheek might be a common greeting in Europe but would be unexpected in the US, West noted.
How long West will stay at Uber is unclear; he has already faced questions about whether he will leave to join Harris’s presidential campaign.
West is married to Maya Harris, Harris’s sister and campaign chair.
When asked if he would return to government, West said that a victory for Harris would most likely prevent him from working in the administration because he was a relative.
“It would depend on a lot of things, not the least of which is:
What would I be going back for?” he asked. |