When I was ​at Google, I kept hearing that California laws in particular are not employee-friendly and that you should ask for an opinion from a personal lawyer

When I was ​at Google, I kept hearing that California laws in particular are not employee-friendly and that you should ask for an opinion from a personal lawyer. As to why this hard stance, I always suspected that sweeping that kind of stuff under the rug would have opened the company to a bunch of annoying lawsuits from shareholders and/or ambulance chasers for something along the lines of "not enforcing the company's rights". All it would have taken was just one successful side project. Also note that, even if the stance was "Google owns it by default", lots of projects were assigned back (https://opensource.google.com/docs/iarc/ https://opensource.google.com/docs/iarc/). The IARC process leaves an electronic trail showing that a project was subject to at least some kind of due diligence (even if it later pockets the employee a lot of money that at some point Google or shareholders could have very hypothetically fought in court for). Or, conversely, the lack of an application might shift the legal burden onto the employee that didn't declare everything as required. Again, the above was just all speculation on my part.