How are we able to see them, FOIA?

Court cases, and documents submitted in them are, unless the judge decides otherwise, public information.

The contents of any evidence brought forward as part of the case by either side as public information that is part of the record of the court case.

This includes information that is submitted voluntarily or extracted via a discovery request. (Not everything you find is public only what you submit as evidence)

Note you can avoid things becoming public but you need a decent reason to "I don't want to share that" isn't enough. It looks like this document was partially redacted for instance.

To your original question courts make the proceedings "public" although there is a process for getting a copy. Not so much a "can you get this" more of a "we don't upload to a server and let web crawlers index everything".

The other commenter is correct but largely not FOIA, which applies to federal, state, and other public authorities.

In addition to sibling, FOIA is only for the government (and probably work that government contractors do that's related to their contract, which this isn't).

What would happen if they used the auto-delete feature?

Like if all messages were auto-deleted after 30 days or something.

Corporations are required to hang on to communications for N years (depending on their type of business and whether or not they are under consent decree)

IMO rules like this are why American corporations are investable. Rule of law is and must be respected.

I'm no lawyer, but this is context-dependent. I have worked in companies where all emails not legally required to be retained longer were auto-deleted after 90 days, Zoom was auto-deleted after 24 hours, and getting any kind of persistent chat was an utter ass-pain, all because Legal was paranoid about liability.

If the company is public, SOX requires 7 years minimum.

This is interesting to learn. Are other countries required to do this? I’m always searching for reasons US stocks have outperformed global for quite some time now.

In the US, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure require corporations to keep emails from 3-7 years depending on their content, with some emails potentially kept forever.

SOX compliance requires 7 years.

To be compliant with regulations they need to keep the records even if the email is deleted from the user's mailbox

Very unhappy legal department. Very unhappy owners. Big fines. Publicly traded companies have a lot of rules to follow.

They would be sued for obstruction

They settle for 1.1 Billion dollars with the regulators. Publicly traded firms are by law obligated to keep a lot of business related communication.

https://www.pymnts.com/news/regulation/2022/goldman-sachs-an...

Banks are subject to far more stringent record keeping requirements than most other companies. Microsoft is not bound by rules similar to the article you reference.

That said, there are some categories of information that Microsoft would have to retain. In particular, once you reasonably anticipate imminent litigation you have a duty to retain related information.

Banks are far more stringent... For the rank and file, because even low level employees in banks can access private information that allow them to insider trade.

For the CEOs, they were already under intense scrutiny for every single trade, so it makes more different.

Hasn’t Google recently been caught doing this (with chat, not email)? “Hey, can we switch to no history?” https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/03/google-defends-a...

And Wall Street firms were fined $2 billion for their employees using non-corporate communication methods for trading https://fortune.com/2022/09/27/wall-street-fines-employee-us...