Amicus
How I helped Uber save tens of millions of dollars with cleaner, more accurate copy.
Because Uber is a gig-economy company and relies on independent contractors, there’s big legal risk in how we talk about them and talk to them. For example, our advertising always had to say “Drive WITH Uber” instead of “Drive FOR Uber.” The former indicates Uber’s place as a platform connecting drivers with riders. The latter indicates that you’re driving for the Uber corporation as an employee. When this line is blurred or crossed in advertising, it put the company at risk for class action lawsuits.
Uber, because it was so big (10,000+ corporate employees), had no system of checks and balances to make sure that legal compliant copy was being published.
The consequences included payouts of tens of millions of dollars in settlements and legal expenses—all due to a few misplaced or inaccurate words. This is a recap of the problem I saw, the solution I pitched, and the tool we implemented to fix it.
Drive with, not for
This is an example of the wording that should be used in an Uber ad—or any gig economy company ad. Now that you’ve seen it, you’ll start to notice it everywhere.
The problem is that ads like these put Uber significantly at risk for legal action.
And it really, really cost them.
So I had an idea.
There were dozens of writers at Uber, with hundreds more people who thought they could write, along with 3rd-party vendors who were hired to create content. As a writer, you also had to navigate a galaxy of out-of-date and inconsistent documentation (right). Being a content cop or trying to educate everyone on working with Legal and following guidelines wouldn’t leave me any time to do my day job. So I thought of an automated solution.
And then I did some research.
Partnering with the Legal team, I unearthed even more costs. So I found Kellyn Kenny, our VP of Marketing, and literally gave her a pitch in the elevator: “How would you like to save Uber 50 million dollars a year for less than 100K dollars?”I got her attention, and made a formal pitch deck to get the funding for my idea.
Then I built a team on my own time
A tool like this doesn’t exist in a vacuum, so after I got a greenlight from Kellyn, I built the coalition needed to launch an internal tool. I found a developer firm, Vector (NYC), and got approvals from IT, Security, Finance, Compliance, Design, and more.I literally walked from office to office, knocked on doors, and took people to coffee and lunch to get them excited about a project that wasn’t a core part of their job.
So what is Amicus? It’s your friend.
If you’ve ever watched an episode of Law & Order, you may have heard the term amicus brief, which means a friend of the court. Amicus was a friend to Legal, Brand, and all of Uber by reducing risk from our words.
The tool was successful because of its simplicity. All you had to do was install a web plugin, then open a Google doc and type. Amicus would scan a company-approved glossary and flag any words that were off brand or would put Uber at legal risk.
It was built from the ground up
Partnering with Product Design, we mapped out the user journey for users and admins, and worked with the Legal and Brand teams to vet and approve the glossary that would populate the backend CMS. Naturally, the backend is more complex than the user experience, but ultimately we made an easy, scalable solution that reduced our risk and saved us millions by catching errors before they were published.
(I’m also happy to say that this tool predated a similar solution that Grammarly put into market in 2019. We designed the solution because there was no off-the-shelf option at the time.)
