This story is missing something, since reverse engineering is legal and done properly [1] gets you around copyrights and trade secrets. We're patents involved?
My guess is corporate espionage. For them to get an injunction like this, they probably paid members of the engineering team to give them proprietary information.
You're going to have a hard time proving it was done properly, clean room, etc, when one of the heads of your department on the topic was a key engineer of the technology you are supposedly reverse engineering when he worked on it at the competitor who developed it.
I guess Uber wants us to believe that Lewandowski downloaded the files for some other purpose than using the information in the job he was going to start in a few days.
Flip side, he can't be barred from using his skills as long as you document clean room procedures.
Thanks, I have a knee-jerk reaction to "reverse engineering is illegal / a tort" statements without nuance.