Doesn't matter, listening to their lawyers doesn't make it right. Lawyers exist to protect their clients from legal exposure, not to provide a moral compass.

If Google's goal is truly to create a safer work environment for everyone, then this is a no-brainer. They had zero problems giving a known-harasser millions to walk away quietly but now they're fighting to avoid responsibility for cases already in the system. Reeks of hypocrisy.

My assumption was that lawyers would have factored in the public relations aspect of the decision too, and are confident they can win both in the proceedings as well as in the court of public opinion.

That doesnt match the training, approach, nor skillset of the lawyers I know. They advise on legal matters, the client decides based on the sum total. Lawyers would explicitly avoid confusing legal opinions and business ones.

Then again, my lawyer friends aren't google lawyers.

The only actual business decisions I've seen corporate lawyers make are "no, that project is too legally risky to do". And even then the decision technically belongs to someone else, it's just that no one involved was both willing and able to contradict them. Anything beyond that pretty much reduces to "here are the legal options available, and their likely legal consequences."

Which is how things should stand - obviously morally, but even from a "ruthlessly maximize shareholder value" perspective. It's at least possible that reputational damage cashes out as a bigger financial risk (e.g. via lost staff, failed recruitment, or new regulations) than increased damages from lawsuits. Corporate counsel is almost certainly not the most qualified to calculate the size and likelihood of those risks. (And morally, of course, it would amount to Pichai et al abdicating responsibility for Google's decisions.)

I suspect counsel does have an outsize effect on these decisions, but not because they have final authority. Rather, the risks they present are generally large, immediate, and quantifiable. People tend to prioritize even unlikely risks of that sort against the slow, ambiguous decay of destroying a reputation or failing to follow a changing industry.

Seconded. Most general advice ("IANYL/TINLA") I've heard from lawyers in Germany about e.g. GDPR boiled down to "1. Don't. 2. If in doubt, see 1." -- it's their job to recommend against taking any risks even if the risks are sometimes necessary. It's your job as a business to assess whether that risk is still worth it.

I think this falls somewhere between "moral hazard" and "lawyers aren't assigned to do that".

If an open case saw a change of venue and then produced large damages, that's easily interpreted as a failure of the legal team to protect Google. If Google's retention rate or recruiting efficiency drop by some percentage, it might well cost more in lost expertise and recruiting work than a bad lawsuit would. But it wouldn't necessarily be discernible as a result of this decision, or even the sexual misconduct issue in general. I wouldn't expect the lawyers involved to be able to predict the size of that second impact and decide accordingly.

Certainly corporate lawyers sometimes enforce counterproductive decisions, but it's almost always down around the project level. For an issue Pichai is personally engaging with, it'd be pretty strange for a lawyer to go beyond saying "This is the safest legal option, but it may have other consequences. If you don't take it, here's the level of legal risk." Somebody else ought to be weighing the costs, and in an ideal world ethics, of making that decision.

this still doesn't make it not evil.

Outsourcing your moral agency to lawyers might be an explanation but it’s not an excuse.

what can Google do? Train their engineers to start taking the LSAT so by the time they get to trial, they will have the skill and experience to take on professional lawyers?

Lawyers only advise on the risks. In this case, they're advising on the risks management has created.

Removing an arbitration clause only opens you up to the risk of a lawsuit if you've done something to open yourself up to the risk of a lawsuit. Google has fostered a culture that has tolerated inappropriate behavior in the workplace. The legal "risk" is a symptom of poor management.

Yeah, this isn’t all that surprising. Chances are they had to get everyone to sign off on the new rules because of how many jurisdictions Google operates in.

Doesn’t really seem noteworthy to me.

You have presumably not read the article.

This article is discussing a message directly from one of google's lawyers.

Pointing out that google's lawyers give the advice of google's lawyers is somewhat less than helpful, as far as observations go.

This is a shockingly unhelpful discussion point when applied to corporate behavior in general. As a significant amount of bad action could be justified as "their lawyer probably advised them to do this".

I don't think it ought to be assumed that one would always apply this same line of thinking to other corporate behaviour.

In this specific case the context is about the few specific instances where this policy will not apply. Given that nearly all these instances seem to involve ongoing litigation, I applied this reasoning.

The point is that "Google just followed their lawyers' advice" is never a valid excuse. Google's lawyers are still part of Google! Lawyers can give unethical advice, and the CEO/HR/whoever makes these decisions is perfectly capable of ignoring it.

Lawyers also can't give illegal advice. No lawyer in the history of corporate lawyers has advised management to sexually harass employees yet here we are.