In an era of massive scale companies and giant projects, it's fascinating how often it feels like most of the success of a project or company's big successes ultimately hinge on the actions of a few key individuals in the right place at the right time - and it never fails to surprise me how little overlap these individuals and the actual actual company org charts share.
My hate for Vivendi and his owner, Vincent Bolloré, grows every time I read about either of them. He is a known far-right billionaire attempting to get his hands on the most media he can, to push his fascist agenda in France. That his company uses scummy practices to bully smaller ones in court is not really surprising.
It's totally normal for corporations to go after business executives personally in civil cases, but it's also usually pretty easy for those targeted executives to have the claims against them dismissed. Typically it's just an intimidation tactic.
These days, sadly, ethical behavior has almost nothing to do with the civil courts. Even in the article at OP, you can see how cases become little more than battles of financial attrition, with tactics (like dumping millions of foreign-language documents) designed to force your opponent to spend huge sums of money in the hopes of forcing a settlement.
I mean, all the intern did was comb through some documents in his native language. I’m sure if he weren’t there, they would’ve just hired a translator (much cheaper than lawyers). Not to disparage the work they did or anything.
The really remarkable “hero” here is the Korean junior executive who stupidly mentioned destroying evidence on the record.
It's also strange that the Korean side didn't destroy that evidence and handed it over in discovery. Most companies who destroy evidence at least try to do a decent job and go all the way. If the servers and individuals responsible were in Korea, an American civil suit would have a hard time reaching them.
I assume most company executives are not experts at evidence destruction. And in this case, it seems that they destroyed all of the documents and then just sent out a "We've now destroyed everything you asked us" email reply back without thinking to include that in the list of things to destroy.
In an era of massive scale companies and giant projects, it's fascinating how often it feels like most of the success of a project or company's big successes ultimately hinge on the actions of a few key individuals in the right place at the right time - and it never fails to surprise me how little overlap these individuals and the actual actual company org charts share.
"The right man in the wrong place can make all the difference in the world."
My hate for Vivendi and his owner, Vincent Bolloré, grows every time I read about either of them. He is a known far-right billionaire attempting to get his hands on the most media he can, to push his fascist agenda in France. That his company uses scummy practices to bully smaller ones in court is not really surprising.
The devil is in the detail, I think in the age of LLMs this will become harder as docs can now be better scanned before they’re handed out.
Mentioned in the article, but the source is the excellent YouTube documentary Valve released for Half-Life 2's 20th Anniversary [0]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCjNT9qGjh4
Can we appreciate that Vivendi Universalis went after Gabe personally and no one is in jail for this.
It's totally normal for corporations to go after business executives personally in civil cases, but it's also usually pretty easy for those targeted executives to have the claims against them dismissed. Typically it's just an intimidation tactic.
It may be common, but it is not normal. It is certainly not ethical.
These days, sadly, ethical behavior has almost nothing to do with the civil courts. Even in the article at OP, you can see how cases become little more than battles of financial attrition, with tactics (like dumping millions of foreign-language documents) designed to force your opponent to spend huge sums of money in the hopes of forcing a settlement.
While not a criminal case, the Stringer Bell rule strikes again.
I mean, all the intern did was comb through some documents in his native language. I’m sure if he weren’t there, they would’ve just hired a translator (much cheaper than lawyers). Not to disparage the work they did or anything.
The really remarkable “hero” here is the Korean junior executive who stupidly mentioned destroying evidence on the record.
It's also strange that the Korean side didn't destroy that evidence and handed it over in discovery. Most companies who destroy evidence at least try to do a decent job and go all the way. If the servers and individuals responsible were in Korea, an American civil suit would have a hard time reaching them.
Maybe they destroyed every relevant mail but missed that one?
I assume most company executives are not experts at evidence destruction. And in this case, it seems that they destroyed all of the documents and then just sent out a "We've now destroyed everything you asked us" email reply back without thinking to include that in the list of things to destroy.
It was also a needle in a haystack as they got document dumped on in discovery to exhaust their few remaining resources.