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Comment by bootwoot | Hacker News Reader

I was taking the referenced chat conversation in the post to have occurred after the legal hold was put in place. It seems far more devious to explicitly avoid records in places that would otherwise have records when a court has already said "you need to have records". I'm not a lawyer and don't know the context that well, though, so this may be incorrect understanding on my part.

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Whether it seems devious or not to you, has no bearing on whether it's legal. The court does not say "you need to create records on this topic going forward". It says "you need to retain records you already created on this topic".

One thing that may confuse people is that some industries like finance are subject to regulations that force them to create records of employee conversations even if normally they wouldn't and even if there's no pending lawsuit. But those are industry specific rules governing specific activities like trading, not a general legal concept that'd have applied to Google.

The records existed for 24 hours and were then deleted.

And yet, it's legal to make a phone call and discuss these matters for hours. Lawyers talk on the phone all the time, for exactly this reason.

You could require transcripts and recordings of all conversations, just in case something pertains to litigation. But this is an obviously bad move from privacy, ethical, and efficiency view points.

The question is whether we want to allow written media which have equal footing / similar properties to phone calls.

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