A US federal judge hearing the government’s antitrust case against Alphabet’s Google said Friday he does not believe he has the authority to sanction the company for excessive use of attorney-client privilege if it is sued by the Justice Department. happened before it was filed.
The department had asked Judge Amit Mehta to approve in a court filing Google, said the company’s “Communicate with Care” program, in which employees were asked to add an attorney to multiple emails, was sometimes a “game” to shield communications that were actually under attorney-client privilege. Didn’t come Google replied that it did nothing wrong.
Mehta of the US District Court for the District of Columbia said that the 140,000 documents that originally came under attorney-client privilege were “eyeballs”, but 98,000 or so were quickly given to the government. But he also said he was “not sure a federal court has authority” to approve that practice because it happened before the government filed suit.
Google’s attorney in the case, John Schmidlin, said 21,000 emails were still at issue.
Justice Department attorney Kenneth Dintzer said Google be approved for the practice and 21,000 emails need to be turned over. He argued that the practice cost the government valuable time in putting its case together.
The Justice Department filed a lawsuit against Google in 2020 alleging it violated antitrust law in handling its search business. The test was scheduled for September 2023.
© Thomson Reuters 2022