How Google spent 15 years creating a culture of concealment

Is this different from retention policy at any other business with competent lawyers?

Yes, these are terrible policies, which has gotten Google in hot water during litigation. Overusing Attorney-Client Privilege is a good way to get it neutered/curtailed during a trial. Moreover, the company has an affirmative duty to preserve data. Leaving it up to individual employees to retain data risks adverse inferences about the lost data, sanctions, default rulings, and worse depending on the circumstances.

> It encouraged employees to put “attorney-client privileged” on documents and to always add a Google lawyer to the list of recipients, even if no legal questions were involved and the lawyer never responded.

> Companies anticipating litigation are required to preserve documents. But Google exempted instant messaging from automatic legal holds. If workers were involved in a lawsuit, it was up to them to turn their chat history on. From the evidence in the trials, few did.

At my previous company (a big semiconductor vendor) the legal dept made it clear that if you had a question, you did not ask them by text. You rang them, because that made it privileged. But they didn't try to escape from discovery of emails - they were retained.

Actually they wanted some retention, because for them a big thing was to have evidence of the date you invented something in case of patent litigation. Everyone was given a paper journal in which you were supposed to make notes, which I totally failed to do.

I worked for a company that was acquired by LU/Bell Labs in the '90's and their IP notebooks were excellent: hardbound with a sturdy cloth binding and thick, high-quality graph paper. We were supposed to have each page countersigned at the end of the day but that rarely happened. We were too busy makin' the donuts.

We got engineering notebooks once and then never again; I think something happened to patent law that obsoleted them. Which could just be that it became much harder to get software patents.