Senior employees at the search giant Google, including CEO Sundar Pichai, have for years hidden thousands of emails from federal officials investigating antitrust claims against the company, erroneously flagging them as private and protected by attorney-client privilege.
According to a Justice Department report filed on Monday, company executives have repeatedly shrugged off federal requests under the guise of claims of “attorney-client privilege,” a practice the agency says has been practiced by company employees since 2013.
In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., Justice Department officials on Monday called on Judge Amit Mehta to take action against the company for violations that they allege unfairly “masked” thousands of documents from federal scrutiny.
In a statement, federal officials asked a lawyer to force Google to release thousands of hidden internal emails. He also wants a judge to sanction the search company for violations that the feds say were part of a deliberate practice put in place by top management, including 49-year-old Pichai.
“Google has explicitly and repeatedly instructed its employees to protect important business communications from disclosure using false requests for legal advice,” Justice Department lawyers wrote in a brief Monday.
Senior employees at search giant Google, including CEO Sundar Pichai, have been hiding thousands of emails from federal officials investigating antitrust claims against the company for years, the Department of Justice (DOJ) said Monday.
“Specifically, Google teaches its employees to add an attorney, a privilege label, and a general “request” for an attorney’s advice to any confidential business communications that employees or Google may wish to protect from disclosure.”
The Federal Reserve on Monday pointed to one incident from 2018 in which Pichai sent an email to YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki to discuss an upcoming press story.
“Attorney client privileged, confidential,” Pichai wrote, referring to then-Google General Counsel Kent Walker. “Kent, please advise.”
The feds pointed out that Walker never responded to the thread, stating that it was “directed to a non-attorney” about an “illegal issue in the press.”
The email was originally hidden by Google as part of the government’s ongoing antitrust case against the company, said the feds, who are analyzing claims that Google is doing deals with device makers to be the default search engine for their devices, and was only released after the Justice Department disputed it. , the department said.
The government lawsuit also accuses Google of creating “illegal monopolies” in online search and advertising that violate federal antitrust laws.
According to the agency, which is headquartered in Washington, D.C., pictured here, Google executives have repeatedly shrugged off federal requests under the guise of claims of “attorney-client privilege,” a practice the agency claims employees have been practicing since 2013.
“In these email threads, the lawyer often remains silent, emphasizing that these messages are not genuine requests for legal advice, but rather an attempt to hide possible evidence,” the Justice Department said.
The lawsuit further accused high-ranking Google employees of introducing lawyer-client confidentiality practices to employees to prevent certain emails from falling into the hands of the government in the event of litigation.
“For nearly a decade, Google has trained its employees to use attorney-client privilege to keep normal business communications from being disclosed in litigation and government investigations,” the Justice Department said.
The officials also said that “Google is teaching its employees to add an attorney, a privilege label, and a general ‘request’ for attorney’s advice to any confidential business communications that employees or Google may wish to keep from disclosure.”
Google, however, claims that its methods are protected by federal law and are comparable to those of other companies.
Justice Department officials called on Judge Amit Mehta to take action against the company for violations that they claim unfairly “masked” thousands of documents from federal scrutiny.
“Like other US companies, we inform our employees about legal privileges and when to seek legal advice,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement alleging that the company has already turned over more than 4 million documents in a Justice Department antitrust case.
“Our teams have been working in good faith to respond to requests and litigation for years, and suggestions to the contrary are absolutely wrong,” a Google spokesperson said. “Like other US companies, we educate our employees about legal privileges and when to seek legal advice.
“We have prepared more than four million documents for [Department of Justice] only in this case — including many who were considered potentially privileged by employees.”
Meanwhile, the Department of Justice, which previously completed an antitrust investigation related to allegations of search bias by the company in 2013, says senior employees knowingly abused attorney-client privilege to hide emails that could potentially incriminate them in alleged deed.
Experts say emails containing a general request for legal advice may not always state attorney-client confidentiality.
“The historical purpose of the privilege is to enable lawyers to engage in candid conversations with a client to deter misconduct—to prevent it before it happens, not to protect misconduct from being discovered,” said University of Miami law professor Michele DeStefano. . Wall Street Magazine.