In landmark Google ruling, a warning to companies about preserving evidence

reuters.com

31 points·JumpCrisscross··9 comments

> Mehta also criticized the company about its “communicate with care” initiative, which involved Google employees adding lawyers to messages and marking them “attorney/client privileged.”

So Google employees were CC'ing random company lawyers to keep the messages private?

I worked at another company that did that. Sometimes it was as casual as moving a conversation into a legal advice slack channel.

If companies are already willing to obscure chat logs, what's to say they won't begin manufacturing artificial logs (or editing existing logs) under this kind of pressure?

People are generally more willing to do slightly unethical things over really unethical things.

That's why in this case, I think it's much more likely that they will simply move to discussions to unlogged avenues like phone calls or speaking in person rather than edit logs.

This is that water cooler innovation thing you just can't without RTO. There's a pesky paper trail when you ask employees to do illegal things online!

Spoliation for $500 please.

You don't even have to record every in person conversation. Why would you need to keep a permanent record of all chat communication ever? How does the law support that?

It depends on your industry... certainly in the UK this is a normal requirement in financial services.

Joe asked me to delete the “free plan” button. I swear.

Joe: I never said to do that.

Records are important, not just for the law, but to cover your own ass.

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