How Google spent 15 years creating a culture of concealment

Google 100% provided advice for concealment specifically targeted at future litigation. Gchat logs were specifically reduced company-wide explicitly to avoid court discovery.

I personally saw the advice to cc a lawyer with a legal question in order to bring a conversation under attorney client privilege.

The penalty they’re facing in now way accounts for the money they saved by concealing evidence, which basically means “keep doing it, it works!”

It's illegal to destroy evidence of a crime but it's not illegal to avoid creating evidence in the first place especially if you genuinely believe that you're not doing anything wrong. Generally speaking, companies are not obligated to preserve every chat forever just in case they get sued later on.

> It's illegal to destroy evidence of a crime but it's not illegal to avoid creating evidence in the first place...

One can see how regular folks might consider the practice of automatically destroying chat and email messages after one to three months destruction of material which could be evidence.

"Never erase anything" seems to work fine for highly-regulated businesses like banks. And while long-term storage of electronic communications isn't free of charge, it's not at all in the same ballpark as storing decades of paper memos and other paper internal office communications.

Also: The widespread directive to "magically" turn documents into privileged communication with lawyers makes Google's bad intent very, very clear.