Extract from Isha Marathe’s article “Slack’s Ease of Use Underscores Its Unique E-discovery Challenges”
Few other tech developments are as big a reminder that email is becoming highly replaceable at law firms as the embrace of Slack.
In fact, at a session at Logikull’s In-House 2022 conference this week, titled “Burning Slack: How to Prevent Chat Data From Destroying Your Discovery Process,” Laura Viero, a product specialist at Logikull, said that once a company downloads Slack, its email usage drops by as much as 40%.
But along with its popularity, the amount of data that flows through Slack—encouraged in part by how easy and seamless the messaging tool is—has been on a consistent rise. And attorneys are oftentimes chasing their tails when it comes to the collection and production of information in the app.
Slack consists of new data formats and volumes that almost always require a different approach to e-discovery than the tried-and-true email e-discovery. What’s more, if attorneys don’t develop appropriate strategies to deal with Slack, they are likely to end up with a time-consuming and expensive discovery process, Viero added.
“We keep hearing that over and over again [from several organizations] that the conversation is just moving to Slack,” she said. “And users, in general, tend to have their guards down when communicating via Slack because it feels so much more casual and conversational than email. But that doesn’t mean that the information shared there instantly evaporates after you hit send. It’s quite the opposite actually—because Slack preserves every conversation, including deleted and edited messages unless you set up specific retention policies.”
