Your mental model is broken in that you seem to think the techs have independent models of what is and is not legal and will "legal fact check" the executives.

Your mental model is broken in that you seem to think the techs have independent models of what is and is not legal and will "legal fact check" the executives. In specific cases this may occur, but in general, if legal comes to a tech and says "we need to delete this", the tech will delete this. If you want to mess the tech around, you don't fire a guy and promote someone else and hire a private investigator to get blackmail on the database operator and hire the mafia to rough up the guy holding the backup tapes to make sure they get the message. You just tell the tech staff that legal says this has to happen. The tech staff does all sorts of things because legal tells them to, totally routine thing. This would not have stood out at all. I mean, I live this personally. When legal tells me to delete or retain something, I don't go get a law degree, and then insist that they let me have all the details to come to my own independent opinion about whether or not we need to delete or retain something. That is every bit as nonfunctional as when I tell them that the task they're asking for will take three weeks and they go get a programming degree and then come over and learn the exact environment we are working in so they can verify that we are telling them the correct estimate.