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A federal judge ruled yesterday that Google must be sanctioned because it deliberately obscured evidence, requiring it to automatically save internal chats involving employees on legal hold. We have dismissed the company’s claim that it does not.
U.S. District Judge James Donato said, “After a substantial briefing by both sides and an evidence hearing that took up eyewitness testimony and other evidence, the court concluded that the sanctions were justified. , he argued that the evidence “was intended by Google to subvert the discovery process, and that Chat evidence was ‘lost to prevent its use in litigation,’ and ‘to deprive another party of the use of the information.’ ‘lost’ in the in litigation. ”
He said a chat created by Google last month in response to a court order “provided additional evidence of highly spotty practices in response to legal hold notices.” For example, Donato cited one of his newly created chats. In it, “an employee said he or she was on ‘legal hold’ but preferred to keep chat history off.”
Donato’s ruling was reached in a multi-district antitrust lawsuit that summarizes lawsuits filed by Epic Games, the Attorneys General of 38 states and the District of Columbia, Match Group, and the consumer class. A trial is pending in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California. The lawsuit concerns the app distribution model of the Google Play Store, and the plaintiffs allege that “Google engaged in exclusive conduct to unlawfully monopolize the Android app distribution market and harmed various groups of plaintiffs in various ways. ”I claim.
The Donato ruling states that Google provided false information to the court and plaintiffs about the auto-delete practices it uses for internal chats. Google deletes her chat messages every 24 hours, unless the individual doc admin has enabled the “history on” setting.
Judge: Google repeatedly provided false information
In this case, there are 383 Google employees on legal hold, of whom approximately 40 have been designated as custodians. Google could have defaulted chat history to “on” for all those employees, but it chose not to, the judge wrote.
“Google, in its October 2020 Litigation Management Statement, erroneously assured the court that it ‘had taken reasonable steps to preserve all evidence relevant to issues reasonably apparent in this lawsuit.’ , says nothing about the decision not to pause chat or the 24-hour default deletion,” Donato wrote. “Google did not disclose its chat practices to plaintiffs until October 2021, as it has been months since plaintiffs first asked about chat.”
The judge then went on to rebuke Google even more.
Since then, the court has expended considerable resources, including several hearings, two days of evidentiary proceedings, and countless hours spent reviewing large amounts of documentary evidence, in an effort to get to the bottom of the matter. I had to. All the while, Google has tried to downplay the issue and downplay the seriousness of its actions. While the first defense was that there was no “ability to change individual custodian defaults regarding chat history settings,” the evidence at the hearing clearly proved that statement to be untrue. bottom.
It’s a mystery how this happened. Since the start of this lawsuit, Google has flagged Chat’s treatment at every opportunity to raise concerns about potential burdens, costs, and related factors. At the very least, Google should have advised and discussed the preservation and related approaches with the plaintiffs early in the litigation. The court has chosen to remain silent until compelled to speak by Rule 37 motions and court intervention. The court repeatedly asked Google why he didn’t mention chat until the matter was a serious one. Especially in light of our unrestricted access to skilled attorneys and years of experience with preservation obligations, we have not provided a worrying explanation.
Donato said: “Another major concern is that at every level within Google, there is a clear intent to keep the ball under wraps when it comes to Chat. They appreciated the “off the record” feature.The company had the ability to store all chat communications system-wide after the lawsuit was initiated, but chose not to [to] We do so without an assessment of the financial costs or other factors that might help justify that decision.”
