How Google spent 15 years creating a culture of concealment

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.