Sean Hollister

Pichai would not, but we’re seeing an email from 2018 where he suggested that Philipp, Sundar, Ruth [Porat, Google’s CFO], and Kent [Walker, Google’s CLO] should be involved in a broad discussion about the investment.

Those numbers were one of the first big dramatic moments in the trial:

Epic will likely call him to the stand today.

In September, Epic had simply proposed a “permissive” jury instruction: “that the jury may, if it chooses, infer that the evidence Google destroyed would have been harmful to Google’s case and helpful to Plaintiffs’ cases.”

But Judge Donato is not 100 percent sure what good the mandatory instruction will do.

“Sometimes they just make mistakes,” Walker says of Google’s business employees. “They think of the word privileged as similar to confidential, but we try to catch that during the discovery process.”

“We produce more documents than any company I can think of,” he says.

Judge Donato is not happy. Google tried to point out the passage Epic didn’t, but the judge cut Google short.

Donato says Google should have made employees live up to the company’s obligations and “ensure employees that were having communications substantive to a case not be given undue discretion not to preserve them.”

Walker wouldn’t say if Google was taking any new steps to make sure employees weren’t abusing privilege but that it was following up internally in the legal department.

Google is now getting its turn to question its own chief legal officer.

He concedes that some Google employees do copy in lawyers, even when no legal advice is being sought or received. (Those are Moskowitz’s, words, not his, but he says yes.)