How Google spent 15 years creating a culture of concealment

> 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

Wow. One of the very first things I learned when onboarding to a US company is that the client-attorney privilege does not work like that at all.

“Privileged and confidential” is not a legal shibboleth (especially not when used so incorrectly).

Yes, and it can actually backfire, by opening the floodgates to all communications. (As you lose all credibility after some point.) You are just betting nobody is going to keep digging.

I'm a little skeptical of the article, because I know that it's not a legal shibboleth, and I think I learned it when working at Google quite a long time ago.

We’re not even allowed to add watchers to our legal Jira since our lawyers have told us it destroys privilege if there are multiple people in the discussion with the legal team. No chance if that’s true that a “cc:Lawyer” would provide any meaningful protection.

I suspect "put “attorney-client privileged” on documents" is only a policy in specific areas within Google due to poor leadership in those specific areas, and that's being magnified for clicks/outrage.