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Judge finds Google destroyed evidence and repeatedly lied to the court [pdf]

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Re: Judge finds Google destroyed evidence and repeatedly lied to the court [pdf]

#111

Post by sgent »

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #94
alach11 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how corporations are going to adapt to a world where more and more meetings are transcribed and summarized by language models. Adopting that technology, while it's a productivity boost, will expose companies to vastly greater amounts of liability. There are a lot of comments that can get made off-hand in a meeting that would never make it into chat, let alone an email.

Just do what my company does, and delete all Teams chats in 24 hours! So secure! So protective! So useful, when you need to refer to what was told you last week, before you understood you needed it.

This court held that once any employee is under a litigation hold then the transcripts need to be retained indefinitely.

Re: Judge finds Google destroyed evidence and repeatedly lied to the court [pdf]

#112

Post by midoridensha »

sgent wrote: post #111
TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just do what my company does, and delete all Teams chats in 24 hours! So secure! So protective! So useful, when you need to refer to what was told you last week, before you understood you needed it.

This court held that once any employee is under a litigation hold then the transcripts need to be retained indefinitely.

The company can just delete them anyway, per their policy. What's the court going to do about it? Jail someone? When has a court ever jailed someone in a big corporation for contempt of court?

Re: Judge finds Google destroyed evidence and repeatedly lied to the court [pdf]

#113

Post by midoridensha »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #57
timemct wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve often thought that when a company, especially one as big as Alphabet/Google, gets fined, it’s simply seen as an operating cost and not as a motivator to do better.

Random thought people say you can't put a corporation in jail. Well they're wrong. You could sentence the board to serve a stint in jail. Or management. Or even everyone that works there. Want to talk about lighting a fire under people.

That would be great, but it's hard to see this ever happening in America.

Re: Judge finds Google destroyed evidence and repeatedly lied to the court [pdf]

#114

Post by sgent »

midoridensha wrote: post #112
sgent wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This court held that once any employee is under a litigation hold then the transcripts need to be retained indefinitely.

The company can just delete them anyway, per their policy. What's the court going to do about it? Jail someone? When has a court ever jailed someone in a big corporation for contempt of court?

The court can find the company (Google) liable, or direct the Jury to consider any hidden evidence would be adverse to Google. If Google loses a (civil) antitrust case to 38 attorney generals it will cost them 100's of billions.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/rule_37 (A) For Not Obeying a Discovery Order. If a party or a party's officer, director, or managing agent—or a witness designated under Rule 30(b)(6) or 31(a)(4)—fails to obey an order to provide or permit discovery, including an order under Rule 26(f), 35, or 37(a), the court where the action is pending may issue further just orders. They may include the following:

(i) directing that the matters embraced in the order or other designated facts be taken as established for purposes of the action, as the prevailing party claims;

(ii) prohibiting the disobedient party from supporting or opposing designated claims or defenses, or from introducing designated matters in evidence;

(iii) striking pleadings in whole or in part;

(iv) staying further proceedings until the order is obeyed;

(v) dismissing the action or proceeding in whole or in part;

(vi) rendering a default judgment against the disobedient party; or

(vii) treating as contempt of court the failure to obey any order except an order to submit to a physical or mental examination.

Re: Judge finds Google destroyed evidence and repeatedly lied to the court [pdf]

#115

Post by midoridensha »

sgent wrote: post #114
midoridensha wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The company can just delete them anyway, per their policy. What's the court going to do about it? Jail someone? When has a court ever jailed someone in a big corporation for contempt of court?

The court can find the company (Google) liable, or direct the Jury to consider any hidden evidence would be adverse to Google. If Google loses a (civil) antitrust case to 38 attorney generals it will cost them 100's of billions. https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/rule_37 (A) For Not Obeying a Discovery Order. If a party or a party's officer, director, or managing agent—or a witness designated under Rule 30(b)(6)…

I'll believe it when I see it. So far, all I ever see are fines that may seem like a lot to individuals, but for these companies can be considered "the cost of doing business". And I certainly never see company executives behind bars for things that would certainly result in prison time for normal people.

Re: Judge finds Google destroyed evidence and repeatedly lied to the court [pdf]

#116

Post by soco »

AlbertCory wrote: post #41

> The record demonstrates otherwise. An abundance of evidence establishes that Google employees routinely used Chat to discuss substantive business topics, including matters relevant to this antitrust litigation. > Google left employees largely on their own to determine what Chat communications might be relevant to the many critical legal and factual issues in this complex antitrust litigation. All true. I'm just gla…

And how is that "off the record" supposed to work anyway? Once you said the phrase, the chat automagically stops sending the texts, or they autodestroy or something? And people get their memories erased like in MIB? Because this looks more like a detective movie scene and less like all day reality.

Re: Judge finds Google destroyed evidence and repeatedly lied to the court [pdf]

#117

Post by euroderf »

alach11 wrote: post #89
AlbertCory wrote: post #41

> The record demonstrates otherwise. An abundance of evidence establishes that Google employees routinely used Chat to discuss substantive business topics, including matters relevant to this antitrust litigation. > Google left employees largely on their own to determine what Chat communications might be relevant to the many critical legal and factual issues in this complex antitrust litigation. All true. I'm just gla…

I wonder how corporations are going to adapt to a world where more and more meetings are transcribed and summarized by language models. Adopting that technology, while it's a productivity boost, will expose companies to vastly greater amounts of liability. There are a lot of comments that can get made off-hand in a meeting that would never make it into chat, let alone an email.

If you ask your LLM for legal advice - based strictly on a reading of what it was trained with - will this be considered privileged communications ?

Re: Judge finds Google destroyed evidence and repeatedly lied to the court [pdf]

#118

Post by euroderf »

more_corn wrote: post #81
rodgerd wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> i think when a court finds you have deleted evidence, that the information deleted is assumed to be evidence against you This is why Alex Jones lost his civil actions: he was so intransigent about refusing to produce evidence that the judge determined he was guilty.

Also when his lawyer accidentally provided the evidence it showed he was guilty.

A teachable moment for legal education.

Re: Judge finds Google destroyed evidence and repeatedly lied to the court [pdf]

#119

Post by revelio »

alach11 wrote: post #89
AlbertCory wrote: post #41

> The record demonstrates otherwise. An abundance of evidence establishes that Google employees routinely used Chat to discuss substantive business topics, including matters relevant to this antitrust litigation. > Google left employees largely on their own to determine what Chat communications might be relevant to the many critical legal and factual issues in this complex antitrust litigation. All true. I'm just gla…

I wonder how corporations are going to adapt to a world where more and more meetings are transcribed and summarized by language models. Adopting that technology, while it's a productivity boost, will expose companies to vastly greater amounts of liability. There are a lot of comments that can get made off-hand in a meeting that would never make it into chat, let alone an email.

If you read the judgement, the judge doesn't really see any distinction between "can technically record" and "must record", with only financial burdens being accepted as a justification for not doing so. The reasoning goes, because Chat could be recorded, it should have been because it's electronic communication.

But this logic can extend to any form of communication that could technically be recorded. It means that, by extension, all video calls and phone calls should be recorded too if you can afford to do so (but it's cheap, so you can). And that in turn means that the cost of remote work just exploded because many meetings that a non-remote company would have in an office, face to face, should now be recorded and preserved if any of the participants are under a litigation hold. But as the employees testified, at a big company like Google basically in a given discussion at least someone is always under litigation hold. So that means every meeting or phone call may have to be recorded. And that in turn means the discovery cost imposed on companies that allow remote work will be much higher.

Did companies just get a justification for forcing everyone back to the office? It does seem so. Maybe even for reducing the international presence of teams even when they're in the office.

The judge doesn't spell out this small extension of his argument. It seems he was mostly pissed off by Google employees obfuscating about the issue and lying to the court (no excuse for that). But having read it, where's the limit? The aspects of law they're citing talk about "electronically stored information". If not using a technical ability to record is interpreted as the same thing as destroying stored information, then the retention procedures at almost every company are going to be found in non-compliance simply because video calls, phone calls and so on are so often not being recorded.

Re: Judge finds Google destroyed evidence and repeatedly lied to the court [pdf]

#120

Post by revelio »

pavon wrote: post #93
sebzim4500 wrote: post #9

It's a useful reminder not to pay attention to legal commentary from HN, most of the comments were saying that Google did nothing wrong w.r.t. these messages.

To be fair nearly all those comments gave arguments about what the law ought be, not about what it actually was. Those two things shouldn't be confused regardless of who is arguing them.

The relevant bit of law says:

"If electronically stored information that should have been preserved in the anticipation or conduct of litigation is lost because a party failed to take reasonable steps to preserve it"

The argument revolved around whether transient chats are "stored" or not. The judge says yes for chats, but doesn't mention phone calls. The comments pointed out that there's no reason not to extend the same argument to phone or video calls, or perhaps in an extreme interpretation any communication transiently picked up by a device that could have theoretically recorded it e.g. an IoT smart speaker that listens for commands.

The judgement also says:

The Committee Notes for Subdivision (e) state that the rule embodies the “common-law duty” of “potential litigants . . . to preserve relevant information when litigation is reasonably foreseeable.”

Well that's a problem and a half. So now this obligation to record everything previously considered transient doesn't only trigger once you are actually being sued. It applies even before you are sued, if a judge thinks that the litigation was "reasonably foreseeable" which could mean almost anything.

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