Corporate communications have changed dramatically in recent years. Today, tens of millions of people regularly use Slack and Teams. In many organizations these are now the primary means of communication among work teams, supplanting email.
The impact of this evolution on eDiscovery cannot be overstated. Increasing use of modern collaboration platforms results in volumes of discoverable data. But as we’ve come to realize, chat data is as different from email as email was from paper memos, so the traditional email paradigm doesn’t apply. Legal teams must continually update their understanding of the newest data forms and modify their collection, processing, and review methods to handle them accordingly.
We’ve been here before. Just as discovery professionals adapted a few decades ago to email and ESI, we now are adapting to the new reality of chat data. But questions remain . . .
What should legal teams expect to encounter with data created and stored in modern collaboration platforms?
How is chat data different from email and other traditional digital data, and why do those differences matter?
What unique challenges are posed by these platforms, and how can we best prepare for dealing with them?
ProSearch experts have shared their knowledge and expertise to answer these questions and more in several articles recently published in legal industry trade outlets.
In a piece published by The National Law Journal, “Chat Is Not Email – A Guide to Modern Communication and E-Discovery,” ProSearch solutions advisor Maggie Burtoft outlines what lawyers and discovery teams must understand about how chat data is different from email and why the traditional email paradigm cannot be applied to chat data.
In another, two-part article series published by Law Journal Newsletters Cybersecurity Law & Strategy, ProSearch engagement manager Elizabeth Pollock-King, Esq. looks at what legal teams should expect in dealing with Slack data in eDiscovery:
- Part one of the series, “The Slack Explosion: Convenient Yet Complicated,” outlines the unique challenges posed by Slack, including skyrocketing data volumes, collection challenges, review issues, and segmenting conversations.
- Part two, “Best Practices to Simplify Future E-discovery,” shares tips for dealing with those common challenges to achieve high-quality production of chat data for litigation.
Email disrupted corporate communications 25 years ago. Today, chat is disrupting email – and it isn’t stopping there. These conversation-centric platforms, which Gartner has dubbed “workstream collaboration tools,” are changing the way we work and will continue to evolve for the foreseeable future. Discovery teams must evolve with them.
Learn how ProSearch is reimagining collaboration and chat solutions to help you better prepare and more effectively manage modern discovery data.
