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How Google spent 15 years creating a culture of concealment

(www.nytimes.com)
203 points tysone | 1 comments | 20 Nov 24 11:45 UTC | HN request time: 0.42s | source
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lxgr ◴[20 Nov 24 23:48 UTC] No.42199412[source]▶
> 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).

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1. bobbylarrybobby ◴[21 Nov 24 21:08 UTC] No.42208672[source]▶
I imagine that this is done to pollute the corpus. When lawyers do want to eventually wade through Google’s docs, if every doc says it's privileged, then they have to wonder: can that notice be ignored on this doc, or is it actually privileged? (This does hinge on “crying wolf” not invalidating the privilege of actually privileged documents.)