"How To Manage The Legal Risks Of Workplace Collab Tools" Law360

In this overview of the February 28, 2023 webinar “Best Practices for Slack/Teams from IG Through Litigation,” Law360 Pulse highlights the panel's discussion on how the "increased use of instant messaging and collaboration tools, especially during the surge in remote work brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, has allowed for new and easy ways for employees to communicate. But these free-flowing and sometimes unfamiliar tools can collect huge amounts of data, and organizing that information can present challenges for in-house legal departments, especially in regard to discovery and litigation."

Redgrave's Eliza Davis and Josh Hummel participated in this discussion alongside Dave Ruel and Jim Gill of Hanzo. The group talked about challenges such as policies surrounding retaining communications, how to organize the voluminous amount of data these tools can collect, and how to best extract that information for use in court and elsewhere.

Here is an excerpt from the Law360 article "How To Manage The Legal Risks Of Workplace Collab Tools":

"The chat and collaboration data these tools create is a lot different than the emails and documents we've been collecting for many years," Hummel said. "It's just not the same."

As far as the general use of these communication tools, Davis said it's important for companies to have well-defined use policies, especially regarding data retention. In order for legal departments to create these policies, they need to understand how employees use them, as well as the regulatory framework the company is working under.

"Having an acceptable use policy to govern use is a great way to set expectations on how employees should use these tools," Davis said. "It helps you make retention decisions early on, too."

Understanding how to best organize and extract the information these tools collect is another priority, the panelists said.

Hummel said companies shouldn't put off employee training or connecting with the right IT people to learn how the products work. If a company finds itself dealing with unexpected legal issues, not knowing how an important communication tool like Slack handles the data it collects could become a huge problem, he explained.

Without a proper understanding of the tools, Hummel noted, companies risk waiting too long to gather data they need for litigation, as well as turning over privileged information during the discovery process. And because these chat tools can harbor millions of internal company messages, the sheer amount of volume alone presents big obstacles, so companies want to be able to tackle that quickly without having to learn how to do it, he said.

"Investigating early and aligning yourself with the right people who understand the tools is so important," Hummel said.