4 Ways to Navigate Data Collection Challenges in Slack

Today we have more ways to communicate within the workplace than ever before. According to a recent industry survey, 51% of workers prefer real-time messaging apps over email. While email still accounts for the lion’s share of employee communications, cloud-based platforms such as Slack have increasingly become an important nexus for worker collaboration. 

Slack is compelling for users with its ability to have threaded discussions between multiple individuals who can join or leave a given channel at any time. These threads are often conversational in nature and will typically include links to external sites, embedded documents, multimedia files, abbreviations, slang, emojis, and even reactions. While a boon to employee productivity, the dynamic and integrated nature of Slack presents a host of challenges to corporate legal departments that must quickly identify and retain information that might be relevant to a legal action. 

Common Challenges 

Preserving relevant data on Slack isn’t as straightforward as one might think. First, you need to account for the nuances of Slack’s conversational format. Access controls are also important because the Slack administrator for a given workspace might not possess the administrative privileges for all the relevant data required to meet a legal hold request. And because Slack makes it easy to embed files from other third-party cloud services such as Box, Dropbox, or Google, you’ll need to consider the access controls and role-based permissions for each connected service.

Of course, Slack isn’t just a standalone collaboration application; it’s a vibrant and flexible communications platform that currently integrates with more than 2,400 third-party applications and even offers users the ability to build their own applications and customized workflows. While these features make Slack a powerful tool and attractive to users, they also make eDiscovery processes involving Slack data more cumbersome and time-consuming, because dynamic data is harder to identify, collect, export, and process.

The challenge of data collection in Slack becomes even more complex for large enterprises that operate multiple workspaces across diverse geographies and departments. These workspaces are often administered by multiple individuals, each with their own rights and credentials. Within these multi-workspace environments, an administrator might think they’re collecting everything, when, in fact, the collection is based on access rights established in the connector API that’s used to share data between the source application and the collecting application. In a multi-workspace environment there can be hundreds of custodians — meaning the legal hold administrator will have to determine which custodian has the right to access data that might be relevant to a legal action.

Four Ways Casepoint Facilitates Data Collection in Slack

As an official Slack Technology Partner, Casepoint makes the collection and review of Slack content simple and straightforward. Here are four ways that Casepoint streamlines the data collection process in Slack: 

1. A Simple and Unified Experience
   With our eDiscovery system set up to support Slack, users don’t need to log in and out of different systems to gather the required data or bring in external assistance. Once Slack data is imported, legal teams can use Casepoint to quickly pull potentially relevant messages from Slack conversations — even emojis — directly into their Casepoint workspace.
2. Enterprise-wide Connection
   Casepoint creates a bridge with your overall Slack environment. Once connected, Client administrators within Casepoint have the visibility and capability to collect data from all Slack users. As a result, legal teams can spend less time tracking down relevant data and can easily connect to and upload attached data.
3. Optimized Data Collection
   New data sources increase the complexity, risk, time, and cost of legal discovery. Our API-based cloud connectors enable legal teams to pull data directly from Slack and into Casepoint for processing and review. This direct connection dramatically reduces the number of touch points and data exposure risks, not to mention the cost and complexity associated with collecting data from a diverse array of sources.
4. Powerful AI-Based Analytics
   Casepoint’s integrated AI-powered analytics capabilities further streamline the legal review process by helping legal teams quickly locate relevant data with precision and speed. Once data has been collected and ingested into Casepoint, users can leverage the built-in analytics tools to gain insights into their entire data set, resulting in faster defensible holds and collections for legal counsel.

Conclusion

There’s little doubt that Slack will continue to have a transformative impact on how businesses collaborate and deliver new innovations to market. As more of our communications shift from structured, asynchronous formats such as email to Slack and other real-time applications, corporate legal teams will be challenged to integrate these highly connected and dynamic applications into their eDiscovery and legal hold process. 

To learn more about how Casepoint can help your legal team seamlessly capture and analyze Slack data, visit www.casepoint.com.