The Texas attorney general's office first opened its investigation into Google's business practices two years ago, and the search giant pledged to cooperate at the time. Now, however, years have passed and Google seems to have forgotten its promise, urging Texas to seek legal action, AllThingsD reported.
Texas attorney general Greg Abbott filed a civil suit against Google this week, seeking to gain access to a bunch of documents Google has allegedly been withholding from Abbott's office. On several occasions, Google has either redacted documentation or refused to turn over certain documents, claiming they are subject to attorney-client privilege. According to Abbott, however, many of those documents in question are actually not protected, because they either were not sent to an actual attorney, or they did not request a legal review.
"On April 13, 2012, counsel for Google identified a document (Bates number GOOG-Texas-1039527 through -29) containing an email that Google claims is subject to the attorney-client privilege and had been produced inadvertently," reads the complaint. "On May 3, 2012 Google's counsel wrote a letter to the Attorney General's Office identifying eleven documents containing an allegedly privileged email and requesting that the Attorney General delete all copies of these documents. The email in question is from one Google Vice President to his superior. Though the email begins with a header that it purports to be 'Attorney Client Privileged [sic]' neither the author nor the recipient is an attorney and the content of the email makes no reference to legal advice."
According to Abbott, the search giant has withheld roughly 14,500 documents citing attorney-client privilege, and a number of them are indeed protected, but other documents are not. "Google has not met its burden of demonstrating that the privilege is applicable to many of the documents withheld," alleges the lawsuit.
Google, on the other hand, reiterated its promise to cooperate. "We have shared hundreds of thousands of documents with the Texas attorney general, and we are happy to answer any questions that regulators have about our business," a Google spokeswoman told AllThingsD.
Meanwhile, Google is also facing an ongoing antitrust investigation in Europe. The probe is expected to reach its climax within a few weeks, as European competition commissioner Joaquin Almunia gave the company until early July to come up with proposals to avoid "lengthy proceedings" on "abuse of dominance" claims filed in May this year.
