"....Based on evidence collected and presented in the civil trial, which started with a bang but ended prematurely with a whimper, Levandowski definitely took the files at the heart of the charges. But the case, the first one by a new corporate-fraud strike force in the northern district of California, is not as open and shut as the government would like it to sound.

“[A criminal case] has a much higher bar,” said James Pooley, a Silicon Valley attorney who specializes in intellectual-property law, adding that the government has to prove that what Levandowski took with him was “a trade secret, that it was valuable, and it was stolen, and you have to prove all that without a reasonable doubt.”

Eric Goldman, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law, and Pooley pointed out that the government is going to have to prove that Levandowski downloaded the documents with intent to do harm to Waymo, that he believed these were trade secrets and that he intended to misuse them......."