Extract from Gregory Evans’s article “Short Message Data 101: Handling Chats During e-Discovery”
Communication between individuals and organizations is continuously evolving. The emergence and adoption of email over 20 years ago vastly improved the pace at which people could share information and documents. Goodbye snail mail, fax machines, and photocopiers! This revolution in communication didn’t just change how we communicated—it fundamentally changed the nature of business communications as we also said goodbye to formal memos and other hard copy documents.
We are now in the midst of another seismic shift. Over the past few years, we’ve seen the rise of chat and instant messaging applications which allow us to communicate and share all kinds of data much more rapidly and with greater brevity.
Many of the implications for business use of chat platforms and IM are obvious. First, as the old saying goes, time is money: the less time it takes to communicate important information to those who need it, the more efficient a business can operate. The ability to collaborate in real time to solve business challenges results in greater organizational efficiency, which ultimately saves money. This and a myriad of other benefits has driven the use of chat exponentially, and the trend will continue for the foreseeable future.
