At the AIIM 2010 keynote in Philadelphia, Google's Cyrus Mistry made a statement that shocked me a bit at the time: "Everyone gets access to all data and keep it forever," he said. In light of the current Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) patent infringement suit brought by Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL), and a certain controversial smoking-gun email Google is reportedly trying to keep out of the evidence, I think Google might want to reconsider that pie-in-the-sky, keep-everything-forever policy.

According to an article on PaidContent.org, the Google email suggests that the company should have negotiated a Java license for its extremely popular Android mobile operating system--which just happens to be the basis for this very suit. Google is arguing that the email shouldn't be allowed in evidence because it's protected under attorney-client privilege.

Google hasn't gotten very far with this argument--either with the trial judge or with another judge charged with working out discovery disputes, according to the PaidContent.org article.

All of the legal wrangling aside, however, this wouldn't be a problem if Google simply had a reasonable email retention policy in place. It's a lesson every company should take away from this case.

Google must generate millions of emails every year as a company. Rather than keeping them all forever--and giving everyone access (if that is indeed their policy)--a more sensible approach might be to archive and delete any emails not covered by regulations after a reasonable period of time.

It's not clear if this would have saved Google in this instance. Android was released 3 years ago and Oracle bought Sun 2.5 years ago (and with it the Java patents in question in this trial). If Google had a policy for destroying non-essential emails every 18 months, for example, it might not be in this predicament. 

But big companies never seem to learn from past mistakes, and as such they seem doomed to repeat them. In the 1990s, Microsoft was done in by internal memos in its government anti-trust suit. At the time, the infamous Bill Gates' smoking gun memo became the poster-child example for why sensible retention policies are necessary.  

The Gates' memo, like the Google email, shows how important getting rid of documents can be.

Lest you think, I'm suggesting that companies should destroy evidence to protect themselves, I'm not. What I'm saying is that within the content store of any large company could be a document, that when presented in the context of a trial could come back to bite you.

As such, any company that maintains a sensible archiving and content deletion policy can minimize the risk from content locked deep inside the company content stores.

Google's Mistry seemed completely sincere when he suggested retention forever was a good idea, and from a historical record-keeping standpoint, it very well may be. But from a legal discovery standpoint it could be disastrous, and that may be a lesson Google is learning the hard way, today in its case with Oracle. 

And it should be a lesson you are learning too--if you're smart, that is. - Ron