especially if the company is not first and foremost within the software industry, it might just be that the legal department does simply not grasp how stuff is used by those software engineers..
@DanielHatton well if they use GPL code internally (tooling or the likes) without redistributing derived work, there is no issue license-wise. still, they would want to see new features in their tools.. so it seems plausible to me without suggesting that illegal stuff happens there