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posted by janrinok on Thursday March 24 2022, @01:25AM   Printer-friendly

Google allegedly hid documents from search monopoly lawsuit, DOJ claims:

Google employees have been improperly using attorney-client privilege to hide documents from discovery in litigation and government investigations, according to fresh allegations laid by the US Justice Department (DOJ).

"Google has explicitly and repeatedly instructed its employees to shield important business communications from discovery by using false requests for legal advice," DOJ attorneys wrote in a court filing for its search monopoly lawsuit against Google.

According to the court filing [PDF], Google taught employees to slap an attorney-client privilege label and generic "request" for counsel's advice label on any sensitive business communications that Google might wish to shield from discovery. Slapping these labels onto communications prevents them from being provided for discovery in litigation.

This practice has allegedly been used throughout all levels of Google's hierarchy, with the DOJ claiming Google parent company Alphabet's CEO Sundar Pichai copied Google chief legal officer Kent Walker onto an email to YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki about how to respond to a press inquiry, with "Attorney Client Privileged" at the top.

In these "camouflaged" communications, the attorney allegedly remained silent on a frequent basis, which the DOJ claims underscored that these communications were not genuine requests for legal advice but rather "an effort to hide potential evidence".


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 25 2022, @02:10AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 25 2022, @02:10AM (#1231928)

    For any of you who don't know your history, they were a single party during their creation before the civil war, eventually separating

    Irony and ignorance meters both broken again! Not really any more relation than your other grate political insight that Nazis were Socialist! The Democratic-Republican party split off the Whigs, who then lost it over the Question, and were Replaced by the FreeSoil party, which then became the Republican party, opposing slavery. Then, in 2016, the Republican Party lost its mind, and is now largely QAnon conspiracy theorists, like Ginni Thomas, Marsha Blackburn, and Majorie Taylor-Green.