Extract from Jim Gill’s article “Three Ediscovery Takeaways from Google Antitrust Litigation”
In the well-publicized case In re Google Play Store Antitrust Litigation (N.D. Cal. March 28, 2023) California District Judge James Donato ruled for sanctions against Google for Google Chat spoliation. There are plenty of ediscovery lessons to take away from this case, particularly given that Google is, in the judge’s words, “a frequent and sophisticated litigation party.” So how did something as fundamental as data spoliation come about?
Case Summary
According to Doug Austin at Ediscovery Today, “The MDL action involves multiple antitrust cases challenging Google’s Play Store practices as anti-competitive. Even before the MDL was instituted, the Court directed the parties to coordinate discovery with an eye toward containing costs and burdens. However, In April 2021, plaintiffs asked Google about a curious lack of Chat messages in its document productions. In October 2021, Google said that Google Chats are typically deleted after 24 hours and that Google had not suspended this auto-deletion even after this litigation began. Google chose instead to let employees make their own personal choices about preserving chats.”
Ediscovery Takeaways
Even Uncommon Data Sources Need To Be Preserved
In two recent industry polls conducted by Hanzo, Microsoft Teams is the clear front-runner in enterprise collaboration tools, with Google Chat not even registering as its own category. However, one of the polls shows 49% of respondents saying they use applications besides Slack and Teams or a combination of applications. This should come as no surprise since SaaS collaboration platforms continue to proliferate in the enterprise space (e.g. Jira, Confluence, Asana, etc.). Just because they may not be widely used or widely collected during litigation does not mean they won’t be important to a case.
