alt Hacker News> If you have communications that can be used as evidence you're probably in the wrong.
That does not match my second hand accounts of how the law and lawyers work at this level, at least in the USA. Lawyers, at least in part because it is there job, will scrutinize every communication for anything that has the slight chance to be interrupted in their cases favor regardless if that interpretation is truthful.
The system of law in the USA is adversarial, the Lawyer's job is to present the case in the best possible light not to find and present the truth. So if something taken out of context plays well for their case it will be used. That could include decades old communications that no one remembers happening on a tangental topic.
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Exactly, the legal system's job is not necessarily finding the truth. It's who can convince the judge/jury better even if they use nasty tactics.
As Cardinal Richelieu famously said, “if you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.”
Much more than that, the legal system is just engaging in empire building here: Everything that is potentially relevant is subject to discovery, which increases billable hours…
And I assume approximately nobody in the legal sector has any interest in reducing these.
The collateral damage of the incentive structure created by this dynamic must be vast. Deleting everything by default as a (reasonable, at a micro-level!) leads to immense institutional knowledge loss.