Image by Elliott Brown

Two years ago, Tony West, then the general counsel for Pepsi, took a look at a newspaper exposé about Uber and told a colleague: “Man, I’m glad I’m not the GC of that company, they’ve got some real problems.”

Business Insider tells how West came to become the top lawyer at the once-troubled company.

A few months after West saw the exposé, Dara Khosrowshahi, who had recently taken over the helm of Uber following the ousting of founder Travis Kalanick, pitched West, a former federal prosecutor, on the idea of joining Uber.

“I left that meeting in a very different mind space, in terms of both thinking about what an incredible opportunity this was, and clearly the challenges the company was facing at that time, which really fit my resume,” he said.

Read the Business Insider article.

Myanna Dellinger of the University of South Dakota School of Law has posted a discussion of a recent case in which a judge faulted Uber with presenting its drivers with a contract that was “likely, frankly, to engender confusion.”

Dellinger wrote about the case in the ContractsProf Blog.

The underlying case is a class action lawsuit against Uber for allegedly misclassifying its drivers as “independent contractors” instead of regular “employees.”

“Whether this is an example of deliberate strong-arming or intimidating the drivers into not joining the lawsuit or simply unusually poor contract drafting may never be known. Judge Chen did, however, order Uber to stop communicating with drivers covered by the class action suit and barred the company from imposing the new contract on those drivers,” Delinger writes.

Read the article.