The first lawyer will be hardly able to contain his delight as he asks the court to mark “WidgetCo Safe Communication Guidelines” for evidence.
Having safe communication guidelines isn’t as damning as you think it is. The counsel for WidgetCo would merely reply that the safe communication guidelines are there to prevent employees from accidentally creating liabilities by misusing legal language. This is no different than admonishing non-technical employees for misusing technical language.
It’s not that safe communication guidelines are damning. It’s that claiming that the lack of discoverable evidence corroborating your statement disproves it while simultaneously having conspired to ensure that discoverable evidence would not exist would be damning.
Would it be as self evidently damning as you think it would be? If so, then why would a company like Google explicitly pursue such a weak strategy? It’s not just Google either. When I worked at a different FAANG company, I was told in orientation to never use legal terminology in e-mail, for similar reasons.
Google did not pursue that strategy. Or at least, if they did, the article you linked doesn’t say so.
What I am saying that Google did not and would not do is that when Barton testified that
Google feared if Bing became the default search engine on Android, “then users would have a ‘difficult time finding or changing to Google.’”
Google would not respond that he was talking horseshit and if what he was saying was true, why isn’t there any evidence of it in our internal employee communications? They would not say this because DOJ would say that this corroborating evidence did not exist because Google took steps to ensure it would not.
When I worked at a different FAANG company, I was told in orientation to never use legal terminology in e-mail, for similar reasons.
Same here. I was told not to say that this new change would allow us to “Crush Yahoo in terms of search result quality”. But I understood the idea to be that since in real life what we were trying to do was just maximize search result quality, we shouldn’t let our jocularity and competitive spirit create more work for Legal.
Of course, maybe the real FAANG I worked for wasn’t Google and I’m just adapting the real story to Google for anonymity purposes. Who knows?
Having safe communication guidelines isn’t as damning as you think it is. The counsel for WidgetCo would merely reply that the safe communication guidelines are there to prevent employees from accidentally creating liabilities by misusing legal language. This is no different than admonishing non-technical employees for misusing technical language.
Indeed this was Google’s actual strategy.
It’s not that safe communication guidelines are damning. It’s that claiming that the lack of discoverable evidence corroborating your statement disproves it while simultaneously having conspired to ensure that discoverable evidence would not exist would be damning.
Would it be as self evidently damning as you think it would be? If so, then why would a company like Google explicitly pursue such a weak strategy? It’s not just Google either. When I worked at a different FAANG company, I was told in orientation to never use legal terminology in e-mail, for similar reasons.
Google did not pursue that strategy. Or at least, if they did, the article you linked doesn’t say so.
What I am saying that Google did not and would not do is that when Barton testified that
Google would not respond that he was talking horseshit and if what he was saying was true, why isn’t there any evidence of it in our internal employee communications? They would not say this because DOJ would say that this corroborating evidence did not exist because Google took steps to ensure it would not.
Same here. I was told not to say that this new change would allow us to “Crush Yahoo in terms of search result quality”. But I understood the idea to be that since in real life what we were trying to do was just maximize search result quality, we shouldn’t let our jocularity and competitive spirit create more work for Legal.
Of course, maybe the real FAANG I worked for wasn’t Google and I’m just adapting the real story to Google for anonymity purposes. Who knows?