Extract from Cassandre Coyer’s article “Legal Hold Struggles With New Data Types Won’t Last Forever”
From Zoom to Slack to Microsoft Teams, the pandemic bolstered platforms that created new ways of communicating and working remotely. While these platforms streamlined ways of sharing information, they have also created new e-discovery and legal hold challenges.
But while many have struggled to keep up with the constantly evolving forms of data, they could still catch up as these platforms build in preservation capabilities.
Tim Anderson, a senior managing director in the technology segment of FTI Consulting, said that while legal hold challenges existed before the pandemic, the new forms of data that emerged in the last couple of years have added new complexities to the legal hold process.
“From a tech perspective, new forms of communication are sort of introducing some challenges there both from a volume perspective … and then what is it that you’re actually preserving?” he said.
To be sure, the new volume of data available makes it harder for legal professionals to target the information needed in discovery, Denise Backhouse, e-discovery counsel at the law firm Littler, said. This often forces professionals to collect more information than they might need, which not only raises privacy issues among custodians, but also wastes critical time and can lead to data losses.
