Extract from Rhys Dipshan’s article “As Teams Foothold Grows, Legal Gets a Handle on Collaboration Data”
These days, platforms such as Microsoft Teams and Slack are giving attorneys fewer headaches. Despite lawyers’ concerns over the volume of data collaboration tools create, these platforms’ growing data management capabilities are fostering more mature e-discovery processes across the legal market, according to the 2022 Collaboration Data Benchmarking Report from Hanzo and The Association of Certified Ediscovery Specialists.
The report is based on a survey of 62 legal professionals, 74% of whom came from either firms or corporate legal teams, with the remaining coming from legal service providers, consultancies, and educational or professional organizations.
In large part, the survey found that many legal professionals have settled on a collaboration platform. Most respondents, 79%, cited Microsoft Teams as their primary collaboration platform, up significantly from the 55% who said the same last year. Meanwhile, 8% cited Slack, the same number as the year before, while 13% pointed to a combination of platforms, compared with 32% who said the same in 2021.
In an “E-discovery Day” webinar discussing the survey results, Ryan Zilm, enterprise records manager at Motiva Enterprises, noted that “a lot of us have shifted to Teams because it’s easy, it’s there—it’s included in a lot of these E5 licenses … and there’s compliance.”
He explained, “Microsoft has done a really great job in the last couple of years of including this into [their] compliance center so you can very easily, very quickly apply retention” to the data created by Teams.
