Even if they're not enthusiastic about the Discovery Process, they at least know to stay out of the way. They know the lawyers need paper to fight the enemy. They know paper is the ammunition of the commercial litigation wars. It seems ridiculous to pay the lawyer to wade through each and every copy of each and every piece of correspondence, let alone the internal memos written at the time. They don't mean to obstruct justice, they just have a very highly developed, and in this case misplaced, sense of how best to protect their company.
Many European managers seem to have a strong emotional involvement with their companies.
Even more so than in the States, executives tend to look on the correspondence they have created in the course of their employment as their own personal property. When a strange US lawyer starts prying into their files, they react to it almost as if it were an invasion of their personal privacy. A great deal of sensitivity and understanding is required to get the Document Collection job done properly. Most executives in America realise that a Document Retention Policy is, in fact, a document destruction policy. It will come as a great surprise to many US lawyers that the primary purpose of the Document Retention Plans in most European companies is to actually retain the documents.