Collaboration Platforms Are the New Water Cooler

Collaboration platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams rose before the global pandemic. They are now essential for employees working in large corporations, whether on-site, working from home or a hybrid of both. Although these platforms offer countless benefits, there is also a downside when it comes to data preservation and collection around investigations and litigation. It is unclear how knowledgeable organizations are about the way they should manage their collaboration data — and how much courts even understand what collaboration data is. There are three challenges regarding collaboration data and e-discovery. The first is increased informality in messaging on collaboration platforms. “Never write anything that you wouldn’t want to be read in court” applies to chats, emojis, GIFs and memes, as well as to memos and emails. The second is managing the vast stores of collaboration data so that searching, sorting and culling are not left until the litigation process is about to begin. The third challenge is that as the definition of collaboration constantly expands, e-discovery professionals need to keep track of the SaaS tools their organization uses and the data they produce. To meet these challenges, your organization can set up data governance policies to manage the volume of collaboration data and use defensible preservation and collection tools to address overproduction. Don’t wait until you are in the middle of a high-stakes investigation or legal matter to learn to manage volumes of new data.