How did Google hide its internal chat messages from discovery?
Awhile back I gave a presentation called "Discovery Beyond Email: Your Future Headache," for best practices for preserving and collecting chat platform documents, like from Slack or Signal.
Google took a different approach:
😬 They set their internal chat messaging platform to auto-delete, unless a particular employee chose to change the setting on their chat to retain the message.
😬 They referred to this as "Vegas" chat--as in "what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas"--since it could never be discovered.
😬 Here's what the cross exam of Google's top lawyer looked like:
“You expected your employees, hundreds, thousands of employees, to stop what they were doing for every instant message that they ever sent or received every day, and parse through a list of topics on some legal hold, to decide whether they should take an action to change a default setting in their Chat before conducting the rest of their business?"
😬 And here's what one judge said about this practice:
“Any company that puts the onus on its employees to identify and preserve relevant evidence does so at its own peril.”
😬 And here is something I never want a federal judge to say about anything I was involved in:
"[I'm] going to get to the bottom [of who was responsible for allowing this behavior'."
😬 After all this came out, Google apparently changed its retention practice, leading certain employees to create off platform communications on WhatsApp, which itself has disappearing messaging function.
😬 And finally, if all this wasn't bad enough, according to the article, Google's top lawyer was referred to the bar "for coaching Google to 'engage in widespread and illegal destruction' of documents relevant to federal trials."
Does anyone think that Google is the only big company that handled electronic records like this? Or did they just get caught?
Link to article: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/20/technology/google-antitrust-employee-messages.html?unlocked_article_code=1.bU4.bhFi.GxgRAmj7odxc&smid=url-share