Google’s Legal Chief Faces Rebuke by Judge Over Missing Chats
A federal judge reprimanded Alphabet Inc.'s chief legal officer over allegations that Google intentionally destroyed sensitive internal communications relevant to two ongoing antitrust lawsuits despite court orders to preserve evidence.
In an unusual move, US District Judge James Donato, who's presiding over a trial in San Francisco over Epic Games Inc.'s accusations that the Google Play app store is anticompetitive, ordered the company's longtime top lawyer, Kent Walker, to appear in court to address questions about the technology giant's record-keeping practices.
Thursday's hearing, conducted in the absence of the jury, came after multiple Google executives, including Alphabet Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai, acknowledged at the witness stand that they incorrectly marked emails as being subject to attorney-client privilege so they can't be forwarded or programmed Google Chat settings such that their communications would disappear after 24 hours. They did so despite a court order that required the company to preserve certain employee communications and other internal documents, Epic claims.
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Donato quickly grew exasperated at Walker's responses.
“You're tap dancing around here,” Donato said, implying that Walker was evading questions by Epic's lawyer on the company's chat preservation protocol.
“Why didn't you just preserve the chats and turn the history on as you did for emails?” Donato asked, adding that other company executives have already testified that the company had the ability to do that. He also asked Walker why the company relied on an employee's discretion to save chats.
Google has also been accused in other court cases of using inappropriate tactics to avoid
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