Uber is not in a regulated industry. Taxi companies do not have any obligation to store email or any other communication for x number of years.
You can destroy whatever you want pre-lawsuit. Once the suit is filed, you are not allowed to destroy anything that is evidence, and most lawyers will caution you away from destroying anything at all at that point, since the most mundane things could be perceived as evidence under argument.
This is being painted as "Uber is being super slimy". Anyone who has sat through a trial having anything to do with electronic communications knows that it's a benefit to everybody if as little logging is done as possible.
> On December 18th, you responded "OK", but on December 19th you responded "Will Do" to the same request from another co-worker. Why was the second co-worker more deserving of a positive response?
Trials are littered with this kind of mundane exchange.
It's why Clinton, Bush, and I'm sure Obama and Trump all used alternative communications systems - because when every thought that is laid down will come under scrutiny, you lose productivity. How are we going to hold companies to standards that we don't expect our nations leaders to follow?
That's at best imprecise; the duty to preserve evidence is triggered when a lawsuit is threatened, filed, or reasonably anticipated.
> This is being painted as "Uber is being super slimy". Anyone who has sat through a trial having anything to do with electronic communications knows that it's a benefit to everybody if as little logging is done as possible.
That is entirely untrue. While records can be inconvenient, they can also be critical to the case of the party retaining them.
"We're going to be doing illegal stuff, so don't talk about it where the courts might hear"
Sounds like the underlying implication of an ethics class. I think reasonable anticipation would be at the point that Uber knew or should have known they were deriving development from stolen material.
Per the article, legal experts seem to agree that the above is not true:
However, companies have an obligation to preserve records that may be reasonably seen as relevant to litigation or that fall under data retention rules set by industry regulators. In Uber’s situation, chat logs that could help get to the bottom of the trade secrets case are now inaccessible. Uber also faces a criminal investigation over the alleged theft.
“It’s a knotty question for courts and lawyers on when the obligation arises” to preserve records, said Julia Brickell, general counsel at the legal discovery firm H5. But “if someone uses a communication device to specifically hide information from litigation because you knew it would result in litigation, that would be foul from the start.”
...
An app such as Wickr “could be a way for Levandowski to communicate ‘By the way, how did we do that back at Waymo?’ and all that vanishes in 30 seconds,” [Judge] Alsup said. “To me it’s plausible that it happened. And the evidence is gone now. Because it was an intentionally set up system to not leave a paper trail.”
Federal civil court guidelines enable judges to tell jurors that they can presume that information covered up by a litigant and now missing would have been negative for that party, Brickell said.
Such a declaration could hurt Uber, as its primary defense has been that Waymo has turned up no concrete evidence of the trade-secret theft. Now, Waymo can claim that such evidence was simply deleted.
“That they were so concerned about covering things up meant that they could have known what they were doing was a crime,” said Nick Akerman, a lawyer at Dorsey & Whitney and a former federal prosecutor in Manhattan. “To me, that’s very powerful evidence.”
You can destroy whatever you want pre-lawsuit. Once the suit is filed, you are not allowed to destroy anything that is evidence, and most lawyers will caution you away from destroying anything at all at that point, since the most mundane things could be perceived as evidence under argument.
This is being painted as "Uber is being super slimy". Anyone who has sat through a trial having anything to do with electronic communications knows that it's a benefit to everybody if as little logging is done as possible.
> On December 18th, you responded "OK", but on December 19th you responded "Will Do" to the same request from another co-worker. Why was the second co-worker more deserving of a positive response?
Trials are littered with this kind of mundane exchange.
It's why Clinton, Bush, and I'm sure Obama and Trump all used alternative communications systems - because when every thought that is laid down will come under scrutiny, you lose productivity. How are we going to hold companies to standards that we don't expect our nations leaders to follow?