“The Court concludes that Google intended to subvert the discovery process, and that Chat evidence was “lost with the intent to prevent its use in litigation” and “with the intent to deprive another party of the information’s use in the litigation.””
Google Chats auto-deleted after 24 hours, and Google never turned that off after Epic and 38 states sued. Employees wrote “should we have history off for this?” because their chats were “more likely to come up in court.” Google told the court in October 2020 it had preserved all relevant evidence. The penalty so far is the plaintiffs’ legal fees, a rounding error for a company that just got caught shredding.