For precisely the reason you indicated.
'wow, Bob picked the worst possible way to solve xyz' negligence, knowingly having incompetent developers. You yourself said Bob's solutions were the worst possible.
'looking back, we should have implemented XYZ differently but we are stuck with that implementation now' can be about something harmless but blown so out of proportion in court.
I mean, I grant the theoretical possibility. In the same way that they could in theory only meet in person. But I just provided you with a counterexample of that not actually happening. The reason people use things like Slack is because they're way more efficient than setting up meetings to discuss things.
So I think in the long term, a company like Google ruling out chat would be significantly handicapped vs their competitors in terms of information flow, response time, and ability to iterate.
That's the entire point of a court, to find correct context and proportion.
Judges are not idiots and they don't like being mislead. If you blow things out of proportion, and your opponents can put up a counterargument, it will cost you.
(If you mean "Has the government failed to meet its burden of disclosure regarding evidence in its possession:" yes, it occasionally happens. The significant incentive against it is that it's immediate grounds for a mistrial and incredibly embarrassing to a prosecutor's office that has it happen on their watch).
We already have a form of that (and more). Rule 37(e) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, permitting a court, when finding intentional destruction of electronic evidence that should have been preserved, to presume, and/or instruct the jury to presume, that the evidence was adverse to the jury or to summarily dismiss the claim or enter a default judgement (depending on which side destroyed the evidence).
Literally, the court can decide “You destroyed evidence, you lose the case, game over”.
On the other hand, litigation generally comes with needing to put your deletion policy on hold, and it sounds like that didn't happen here?
Even more frustrating was finding myself in a situation where I remembered an old email that would be enormously helpful, either because of the information in it, or because I could reuse the bulk of something I had invested a lot of effort into writing, and knowing that this work was gone forever.
You have a contact you remember who emailed you three years about a thing... you'll never find them again.
I was genuinely shocked to discover how often I needed an email from over two years ago to check on something or someone. Oh well.
Same problem. So, I asked the company IT staff, what is the recommended solution? The answer was "oh, just create a folder on your network drive, and drag-and-drop the .MSG files into there."
This answer was apparently vetted by the same company lawyers that came up with the 2 year retention policy in the first place. I don't have the courage to confirm this, but I really would like to ask them what the point of all this even is.