This explanation wasn't just about lawsuits.
Other things in a similar category are:
- negative media attention (media scrutiny increases proportionally to organization size)
- doing something that upsets an influential group and may have consequences for the rest of your business (think how big the outrage would have been if Apple, Google or Microsoft tried making an "Uber" app before Uber existed)
- bringing down the service which is being worked on, potentially breaking SLAs
- failing to meet customer / legal commitments, particularly in regards to internationalization, accessibility etc.
- security incidents, which are presumably a bigger deal, as your project is connected to the rest of your infrastructure
- getting cancelled online, which causes employees (unrelated to the project) to quit
- natural, random and serious consequences that result from the fact that your project needs the company to hire additional employees. E.g. there's a certain number of people willing to commit sexual assault or financial fraud in the population, and the more people you hire, the more likely it is that you get one of them.
I work for "big tech" and have worked for others. Other than some CYA training there really isn't a lot of cross talk between engineering productivity and this sort of risk aversion.
Process, complexity, inefficiency is just something that happens for big companies and big software. Things slow down and then there's a negative feedback loop and things just go down hill. Innovators dilemma sort of stuff.