Companies regularly face questions about how much of any internal report should be distributed to the public. Attorneys and other observers unaffiliated with Uber presented a variety of viewpoints in interviews with Corporate Counsel about how they believe a company in Uber’s position should handle Holder’s report.
Uber’s case is unique, the lawyers said. While some said no company should be forced to release an unredacted report that could breach ethical and privacy protections, others said Uber could use broad disclosure of the report to better highlight how the company is maturing.
“This is an opportunity for Uber to draw a line in the sand—that was then, this is now,” Richard Levick, chairman and CEO at public relations firm Levick, said of the release of information from Holder’s report. “This is the tipping point … where they can either move on or stay in this terrible morass.”
A spokeswoman for Covington declined to answer questions about the investigation when reached by Corporate Counsel. Uber did not respond to Corporate Counsel’s requests for comment on the release of Holder’s report, but The Wall Street Journal reported that an Uber spokesman said, in the interest of privacy, an unredacted version of the full report would not be released.
Uber launched the investigations after a former Uber software engineer, Susan Fowler Rigetti, published a blog post in February that portrayed the company’s work culture as biased against women and where managers ignored sexual harassment complaints she and other female workers made. Just hours after Fowler Rigetti published her account, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick tweeted that what’s described in the blog post is “abhorrent & against everything we believe in.” He ordered an “urgent investigation” by Uber chief human resources officer Liane Hornsey.
Hornsey and Uber board member Arianna Huffington, according to the WSJ, launched an internal review to get employee feedback and take questions. Perkins Coie, which Uber originally hired to investigate Fowler Rigetti’s particular claims, is also interviewing employees for a broader investigation, the WSJ reported.
That review is a companion to Holder’s three-month inquiry. The Covington team interviewed certain employees in the firm’s San Francisco office about their experiences at Uber, the WSJ reported.
Uber’s Tough Choices
Uber has faced an onslaught of recent challenges to its public image. Federal investigators are looking at the company’s use of regulator-skirting software called “Greyball.” Uber recently fired autonomous vehicle lead Anthony Levandowski amid a spat with rival Waymo—Google’s self-driving car spinoff—over alleged trade secret theft. In New York City, the company underpaid drivers.
How Uber handles the release of Holder’s findings appears to be all the more significant.
There are several ways a company can manage the release of a potentially negative internal report, said Levick, whose firm has been involved in a number of high-profile crisis management campaigns, including the response to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. A company’s options would include releasing a summary of the findings or, over time, slowly dripping the information contained in the report. And a company can release its full report, with certain information, such as employee names, redacted for privacy.
“If it’s a summary, the questions by the press will be: ‘What about the full report?’ and that will dominate the narrative,” Levick said. “And the other problem if they do a summary is ensuring that [the full report] is not going to leak.”
The public and Uber’s employees both expect transparency, Levick added. “I think we’ve seen enough examples where there wasn’t [transparency] that caused significant blowback,” he said. Levick cited, for instance, Baylor University’s decision not to release a full report on sexual assault claims against school football players.
At the end of the day, distributing the detailed report with redacted information is the best way forward for Uber, Levick said. “By releasing the full report, names redacted, they can make this a turning point,” he said. “And there should be three messaging points: This is what happened, this is what we’re doing to address what happened and this is what we’re putting in place to make sure it never happens again.”
Employment lawyers, however, aren’t so keen on the idea of releasing a full, detailed report, regardless of whether employee names are redacted.
William Milani, a partner at Epstein Becker & Green, in New York, said employers must consider confidentiality and non-retaliation policies to be top priorities when faced with whether to publish an internal investigation.
