Enterprise collaboration platforms more than proved their worth in 2020. Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Slack, and others were rolled out enterprise-wide at an unprecedented pace to facilitate secure work-from-home communication and collaboration for organizations across the globe. As pandemic safety concerns subside, several enterprises have announced their return to the office. However, many indicate that the hybrid work environment is here to stay. To support this lasting dynamic of office collaboration, legal teams need to proactively expand the scope of content capture and governance beyond email to include these collaboration platforms powering their business.
In a recent survey conducted by eDiscovery vendor, Logikcull, “nearly 20% of companies who adopted Slack saw their email use decline by 40 to 60%. If you’re only dealing with emails (in reference to document review), you’re missing half the story…” When preparing for external litigation or investigating an internal matter, emails will no longer serve as a propionate data set as much more inter-company communication is happening over chat. Furthermore, beyond chat conversations, these platforms create other discoverable matter through video conferencing and content sharing that also needs to be preserved and governed.
The benefits of these platforms are indisputable and many enterprises have seen a marked improvement in employee productivity. However, a recent survey performed by the Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) reports that in-house counsel are struggling to capture the content from these platforms for eDiscovery. The primary issue is many of them are in-equipped to capture and govern these platforms with their pre-existing legal technologies. In the aforementioned ACC survey noted, “71.6% of respondents marked their organizations as immature or intermediate when it comes to collecting data from online meeting platforms, internal messaging, social media, and text/instant messaging applications.” While some of the collaboration platforms support native retention and data export capabilities, consolidating this content with other in-scope data sources and culling of the data for relevancy adds complexity and substantial cost to the eDiscovery process.
The American Bar Association estimates that as much as 80% of total litigation spend goes towards document review. This equates to $42 billion dollars per year! As enterprise collaboration content becomes the epicenter of legal eDiscovery, empowering legal teams with comprehensive technology to govern, search, and cull the entire corpus of enterprise data is critically important.
As the landscape of enterprise collaboration continues to evolve, our team has and will continue to deliver comprehensive solutions to capture, govern, and retain these critical business communications. Please contact your account manager or [email protected] to learn more.
