Is Slack Content Discoverable? Yes, It (Definitely) Is

Electronic communication has come a long way in a few short decades. In 2006, Rule 34 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure was amended to confirm that discovery of electronically stored information stood on equal footing with discovery of paper documents.

Unlike some other eDiscovery processes, a legal hold reaches far beyond your legal department and can potentially impact personnel across your whole business.

The events of 2020 highlighted two major challenges that modern in-house legal teams face. First, there has been an explosion of data sources across most organizations. From team collaboration platforms (Slack, MS Teams, etc.) and video conferencing tools (Zoom, Google Meet, Cisco Webex), to mobile text messages, company websites, and social media accounts, companies are faced with new kinds of ESI being generated in real-time throughout their organizations.

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) has been law for three decades (it turned 30 in 2020), but it’s fair to say that the world has changed considerably since it was first enacted in 1990.

In a world where more than 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every day, the eDiscovery process isn’t only complex and time-consuming, but it can be extremely costly as well.

Optical character recognition (OCR) offers organizations the opportunity to get a much better digital handle on the information they store.

In an era where a single social media mishap can spiral into a legal nightmare, social media archiving is increasingly becoming a safety net for organizations.

Working from home is an increasingly common reality for workers across a wide range of sectors. While remote working presents the opportunity for a better work-life balance, can increase productivity levels, and even save your company money, it also brings a unique range of challenges for HR teams.

Social media might seem like a lawless environment where cruel comments and reckless libel are simply the order of the day—but there have been instances where courts have classified social media posts and comments as defamation. This is true both in a country like the UK, where defamation is generally easier to prove, and the US, where the legal threshold is much higher.

As of 2022, Slack has over 35 million daily active users from one million organizations, like Amazon, PayPal, Target, Airbnb, Shopify, and Pinterest. And there's very good reason for its popularity — when it comes to internal communication and collaboration, its functionality is truly exceptional. But with great power comes great responsibility.