Nailed for being the only guy stupid enough to write instant messages bragging about misleading the FAA.
As a longtime corporate grunt, I can guess exactly how management leaned on him. He should have left and let the scumbags find another patsy to do their dirty work.
It reminds me of Lenin signing lists of people to be executed and when asked later about it, saying that his signature was just to show he had read the list not to approve of executions.
I do not know if these discussions happened in WA, but WA had one party consent audio recording laws instead of all party consent, then executives would be more wary of instructing underlings to do something illegal.
Unless your corporate retention policy is only 6 months. I setup an archive to keep important emails around only to find out our retention policy had been applied to it.
Once an org gets burned by discovery in a lawsuit they go to great lengths to ensure it will never happen again.
Not sure about your healthcare, but the healthcare company I work for is full of ex-aviation engineers who are happy to comply with our regulatory requirements.
As long as they don’t see who
is printing out their emails, still possible to CYA - but
it does draw a giant target on ones back if you’re obvious about it.
In a broad sense, not specifically related to not retaining data as a legal protection, institutional memory is somewhat overrated because of how much low-value content is retained and how it was a snapshot of how a different world was understood.
Many of those juicy emails are from before the past few years' wave of tech lawsuits.
At least at the entry level, I think a lot of the "don't say the word 'competition'" training started as a reaction to relatively recent legal tangles - it wouldn't be surprising if people at the senior level also have gotten more careful about how they communicate.
As a longtime corporate grunt, I can guess exactly how management leaned on him. He should have left and let the scumbags find another patsy to do their dirty work.