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.

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

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.

Almost every day after a European football match, there’s another media headline highlighting a player who received racial abuse on social media. Football clubs condemn it. The content gets reported to social media platforms. Accounts are deleted. Authorities are notified and declare a ‘zero tolerance’ policy against discrimination and prejudiced behavior. Many players share the posts, highlighting the racism they continually face.

The digital revolution has transformed the banking industry. As financial services and associated communications move online, it is more important than ever for institutions to manage and control their online presence.

The issue of defamation has been in the news a lot over the last few months. Johnny Depp lost a prominent case against the publisher of the UK’s The Sun newspaper. Prince Harry sued a tabloid. The source behind the New York Post’s infamous Hunter Biden laptop article sued Twitter for allegedly making him out to be a hacker. And an Indian court cleared a journalist in a #MeToo defamation case involving a major political figure.

One of the reasons Slack saw such widespread adoption, especially early on, was the fact that companies could use it for free. Like many SaaS tools, Slack operated on a “freemium” model, meaning organizations could use it for free, and then upgrade as their needs grew.