Slack, the massively popular communications platform, is changing how we talk to each other. Thanks to Slack, more and more organizations are moving away from email and towards chat. Instead of discussing business in Outlook, modern teams take their work—their discussions, their files, their planning documents and notifications—to Slack. The traditional email is being left behind. In a 2015 survey, Slack reported that companies that started using the platform subsequently saw their email usage drop by 48.6 percent on average.
That viral adoption is great news for Slack and for the growing community of individuals and organizations that are turning to Slack to improve efficiency. But for lawyers conducting discovery or investigations, the disruption Slack brings to traditional forms of communication is, well, painful. Legal professionals, after all, are used to documents. Not chat rooms. Slack’s success means that, today, if you’re only dealing with email, you’re missing half the conversation.
How Slack Is Complicating Discovery and Investigations
A “team collaboration tool” that allows users to message, share files, search conversations, archive information and more, Slack is, in essence, a data repository fused with a high-tech chat room.
Slack allows fast paced communication, all logged in a highly searchable environment called a “workspace.” It's one of the fastest growing communications platforms ever, now boasting seven million daily users sending billions of messages.
But beyond messaging, Slack makes it possible to do much of one’s work without ever leaving the Slack platform. With more than 1,000 apps and integrations, Slack lets users edit documents, hire employees, pay vendors, and even make phone calls all through Slack—and each integration creates a discoverable record within the app.
It’s a treasure trove of valuable information—that is, if you can make sense of it. Here, for example, is what a simple record of a user joining a channel looks like when exported directly from Slack:
{
“user”: “UA0JHQYUT”,
“text”: “<@UA0JHQYUT> has joined the channel”,
“type”: “message”,
“subtype”: “channel_join”,
“ts”: “1522794741.000217”
}
As the data gets increasingly complex, interpreting it becomes increasingly difficult, with something as straightforward as a comment on a shared file creating several pages of virtually indecipherable code.
For lawyers, that’s a major problem. You can’t just shove that data into your document review platform and expect to make sense of it.
In the past, legal teams only had to sift through emails, office documents, PDFs, and images. When it comes to litigation and investigations, existing systems are designed for these processes, for discrete documents. But that means those systems were unable to handle data from sources where more and more of our communication is happening—in Slack.
Until now. On Monday, Logikcull released a new Slack feature that allows legal professionals to easily, quickly, and securely use Slack data as part of their discovery and investigations process.
Gaining Control of Slack Data With Logikcull
Logikcull makes reviewing Slack data simple, rendering it readable, searchable, redactable and producible. With Logikcull, users can now ingest files exported from Slack, as well as Slack archives. This allows users to organize and make sense of the communication logs contained within the Slack platform, so they can be easily searched and reviewed in order to discover pertinent case material.
Logikcull goes beyond what's available in Slack itself, showing changes to messages and records of deleted conversations that Slack typically obscures from users. Logikcull now reveals changes to messages and records of deleted conversations that would otherwise be hidden—allowing the most transparency into Slack data ever.
“The tools used to process, search and review information for legal disputes weren’t designed to handle the abundance of new data sources that are created daily,” says Andy Wilson, CEO and co-founder of Logikcull. “We’re building a platform that adapts to the rapidly changing way in which people communicate and the legal and compliance hurdles that creates. This new feature is a big step forward in terms of bringing new, modern-day innovations to the legal market as well as fulfilling our company mission to make all data sources discoverable.”
To learn more about how Slack is changing the way discovery and investigations are conducted today, download our guide to Slack discovery here. Or, to see how Logikcull handles Slack data with drag-and-drop simplicity, sign up for a demo.
This post was authored by Casey C. Sullivan, who leads education and awareness efforts at Logikcull. You can reach him at mailto:casey.sullivan@logikcull.com or on Twitter at @caseycsull.
