Slack is the next frontier in investigations and discovery. The team collaboration tool—part chat room, part data repository, part knowledge center—has become one of the fastest growing business applications ever. Heralded as an “email killer,” Slack has led to dramatic reductions in email communication, as workplace conversations move from the inbox to the chat room. In organizations where Slack adoption is strongest, email use can be cut by up to 60 percent, making Slack a source of information that can't be ignored.
Handling Slack data in discovery and investigations poses unique challenges to today’s legal teams. After all, our current discovery system has been constructed around discrete documents, but chat systems like Slack are taking over. What counts as a document, for the purposes of discovery, in Slack? Who is that document’s custodian? And how are legal professionals to make sense of the data that comes out of Slack—data that can be incredibly illuminating, but almost unintelligible when exported directly from the application?
Despite these challenges, millions of businesspeople use Slack and similar messaging platforms every day, which means workplace IMs are becoming critical evidence in major lawsuits across the country—and attorneys need to get on board, or risk missing out on half the conversation.
Attorneys need to get on board, or risk missing out on half the conversation.
For tech-savvy attorneys, Slack data can provide a wealth of information, information that can help win cases. That’s the subject of Logikcull’s newest case study, featuring litigator David Slarskey, who used Logikcull to uncover Slack data that proved essential to obtaining a favorable settlement in a recent case.
“It used to be Bloomberg Terminals where you’d discover the details people didn’t want on the record,” the New-York-based litigator says. “Today, that information is in emerging communication sources, like Slack.”
“I think you’re really doing a disservice to your clients if you’re limiting yourself to emails,” says Slarskey. “We have an obligation as lawyers to stay abreast and one step ahead,” he explains, “because that’s where claims are won and lost: on the communication record.”
“I think you’re really doing a disservice to your clients if you’re limiting yourself to emails.”
Logikcull’s new case study on Slack discovery details how, with the right tools, litigators like Slarskey are able to turn Slack data from a burden into an opportunity and uncover evidence essential to their cases. Download the case study here.
