Extract from Hanzo’s article “How to Preserve Slack and Teams Data Without Disrupting Workflows”
As collaboration tools become central to daily operations, you may need to determine how to preserve Slack and Teams data without disrupting current IT or Legal workflows. Slack and Microsoft Teams now contain critical business conversations, shared files, and decision-making context. Preserving that information for legal and regulatory purposes may feel risky. You may worry that implementing preservation measures could slow your teams or interfere with daily communication.
If litigation, an investigation, or a regulatory inquiry becomes possible, preservation obligations often arise sooner than expected. The challenge is to identify a way to preserve Slack and Teams data that supports defensibility without disrupting your organization’s operations and without high costs.
Why Collaboration Data Creates Unique Preservation Challenges
Slack messages, Teams chats, and collaboration data move quickly and may seem informal, but the law treats them as electronically stored information (ESI). Under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, discovery obligations extend to relevant ESI, including collaboration platform data, when it is within your control. Unlike email or files, this information spans:
- • Internal and External Channels
- • Public and Private Channels
- • Individual Chat Threads
- • Reactions and Comments
- • Edits and Deletions
- • Reference links to other Integration Apps
