Google officials sent out a confidential document in late 2008 as the company dealt with lawsuits involving patent, trademark, and copyright issues and antitrust scrutiny over an advertising contract with rival Yahoo.
The executives wrote in the memo, “We believe that information is good,” to the staff. However, they noted that competitors or government authorities may take advantage of things that Google employees casually and carelessly wrote to each other. Google stated that employees should “think twice” before communicating with one another about “hot topics” and avoid sarcasm and speculation to reduce the likelihood that a lawsuit could reveal remarks that could be damning.
Additionally, the technology was modified. “Off the record” was the new setting for the company’s instant chat application. The following day, a careless phrase would be erased.
The memo was the first shot in Google’s 15-year battle to make internal communications automatically deleted. The internet behemoth established an office culture that attempted to reduce its information while simultaneously storing the world’s.
Its strategies include limiting its technology and employing legal privilege as a general defense, cautioning that a single word may bring down even the most prosperous company.
In three antitrust cases against the Silicon Valley giant over the past year, hundreds of documents, exhibits, and witness testimony were used to piece together how Google created this culture of distrust.
In order to prove monopoly activity, the plaintiffs – Epic Games in one case and the US Department of Justice in the others – had to examine hundreds of Google engineers’ and executives’ emails, memos, and instant messages.
As demonstrated by the testimony and exhibits, Google took a number of measures to control internal communications. In addition to constantly adding a Google lawyer to the list of recipients, even when there were no legal problems and the lawyer never replied, it pushed staff members to include “attorney-client privileged” on papers.
Businesses that expect to be sued must save their records. However, Google did not automatically place legal holds on instant messaging. Employees were responsible for turning on their chat history if they were sued. Few did, based on the trials’ evidence.
Google is by no means alone in its efforts to keep more modern forms of communication out of the legal system. However, the judges in all three antitrust cases have criticized the corporation for its communications methods, giving it the most widespread criticism for its conduct.
Judge James Donato of the US District Court for the Northern District of California, who oversaw the Epic case, claimed that Google had “a frontal assault on the fair administration of justice” and that the company had “an ingrained systemic culture of suppression of relevant evidence within Google.”
Google’s document retention policies were deemed “not the way in which a responsible corporate entity should function” by Judge Leonie Brinkema of the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, who is in charge of the company’s antitrust case involving advertising technology, during a hearing in August. She continued: “An awful lot of evidence has likely been destroyed.”
Google said in a statement that it took “our obligations to preserve and produce relevant documents” very seriously.
