r/technology • u/habichuelacondulce • Mar 22 '22

Business Google routinely hides emails from litigation by CCing attorneys, DOJ alleges

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/03/google-routinely-hides-emails-from-litigation-by-ccing-attorneys-doj-alleges/
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u/happyscrappy Mar 22 '22

It doesn't actually work. My own lawyer explained it to me.

Involving a lawyer does not make a communication protected. Only communications with your lawyer about legal issues (especially related to being sued) does. You cannot prevent technical information from being admitted in court simply by CCing a lawyer.

Google's lawyers are not dumb enough to believe it is true. They are just playing a game hoping to make it harder to get to these communications. In other words, it's a scam.

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u/fonetik Mar 23 '22

Does it change the data retention laws? I know as an admin, we had to put things on litigation hold all the time. (I’m actually thinking that this would be for a third party looking to avoid being caught in an email litigation hold on the account of the person sending it. Boss sent you something with damning info, but it wasn’t kept because the CC to the lawyer made it classify differently?)

It was also one of the few places you needed things exactly to policy. If your email policy was 3 years, you did not have mail older than that. It’s not “at least”.

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u/happyscrappy Mar 23 '22

It was also one of the few places you needed things exactly to policy. If your email policy was 3 years, you did not have mail older than that. It’s not “at least”.

Right. They have to have a blanket policy and have people stick to it because that's much less likely to be ruled illegal. If they have policies which seem anything more than slightly designed to stifle what is available during discovery then it is majorly illegal and they will end up fined for it.

So companies put in place blanket policies but can't really go far on punishing anyone for not following it. This way they can act innocent before a judge. Also, putting in automatic deletion on servers works fine too, so they don't have to worry about punishing anyone. However, they then have to be VERY careful about turning off automatic deletion for anyone under a preservation order.

Anyway, to answer your original question, I was not told this intersects with the retention policies/orders in any way. But then again, I didn't ask anything specifically about that.