The Lawyer's Guide to Discovery and Investigations in Slack
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# # # # # # # # The Lawyer’s Guide to Discovery and Investigations in Slack How Slack Is Changing Communication and Disrupting Discovery as We Know It The Lawyer’s Guide to Discovery and Investigations in Slack Page 1 of 24 Slack is changing the way we communicate A photo of a cat. A series of emojis. A heated back and forth. A message from a bot. This isn’t your uncle’s Facebook page or the comment thread of some website. It’s how millions of corporate professionals are communicating today. It’s Slack. Slack is the massively popular messaging system meant to make collaboration easy and seamless. But if you’re a legal professional, Slack could make your life much more difficult. Oh #$%*! Logikcull makes Slack discovery easy, affordable, and instant, but Logikcull’s The Lawyer’s Guide to Discovery and Investigations in Slack Page 2 of 24 Instant Discovery is not created by, affiliated with, or supported by, and has no business relationship with Slack Technologies, Inc. Today, Slack has Sending Across Billions Thousands daily7M active users of daily messages of workspaces 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.” Thanks to Slack, more and more business communication is moving from the inbox to the chat room. One of the fastest growing apps ever, Slack is used by everyone from the smallest startups to Fortune 100 companies—more than 75 percent of them. It has more than seven million of daily users, sending billions of messages, across thousands of workspaces. This is Slack, the face of communications today. The Lawyer’s Guide to Discovery and Investigations in Slack Page 3 of 24 Slack Is Disrupting Discovery and Investigations Slack represents an incredible challenge for modern legal professionals. 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. Legal teams are used to documents. Not chat rooms. But chat rooms are taking over. In one survey, nearly 20 percent of companies who adopted Slack saw their email use decline by 40 to 60 percent. Today, if you’re only dealing with emails, you’re missing half the story. Slack makes discovery for legal teams incredibly painful. With Slack, users can direct message, create chat rooms, share files, edit—or, depending on the context, spoliate— Slack messages from the past, and more. Account managers may not have access to certain Slack communications. Through thousands of integrations, Slack gathers a massive amount of data, all stored in one place. Further, individual users can even set their own retention and deletion policies, greatly complicating attempts at consistent information governance. But beyond that, how do you even review Slack data when, until recently, virtually no discovery platform was capable of handling it? { “user”: “U0753B1L3”, “topic”: “Reexamining/updating historical financial data”, “text”: “<@U0753B1L3> set the channel topic: Reexamining/updating historical financial data”, “type”: “message”, “subtype”: “channel_topic”, “ts”: “2018-02-28 11:04 AM”, “user_avatar”: “”, “username”: “U0753B1L3” } A single message, as it appears when exported from Slack. The Lawyer’s Guide to Discovery and Investigations in Slack Page 4 of 24 Difficult Data—And Tons of It Slack stores an enormous amount of data. By default, Slack preserves all messages forever, creating a mammoth archive of an organization’s communications. That data is not limited to messages sent between Slack users. Slack amalgamates data from hundreds of sources, all in one A single Slack message place. With more than 1,000 connected apps, Slack has created contains data on: a centralized hub of information that can pull together a massive universe of information. text attachments Data in Slack is paradoxical: It is both disjointed, highly connected threads to other data sources, and constantly variable, all at once. response types ephemerality Communication in Slack may take place in public channels, similar links to open chat rooms. It may happen in private, where only the edits data source participants know what is being communicated. Or it may happen + dozens more one-to-one, through direct messages. And those records are editable—all of them. Users can create and delete channels, edit individual messages, add and remove files, create, modify, or remove integrations, and get rid of visible records altogether. Users can delete or edit messages with just a click. The Lawyer’s Guide to Discovery and Investigations in Slack Page 5 of 24 Slack 101: Understanding the “Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge” Slack bills itself as an “email killer” and “where work happens.” In some organizations, this is almost true. In a 2015, 1,629 paid users reported that Slack reduced their organization’s email usage by an average of 48.6 percent. 48.6% reduction in email after introducing Slack In some organizations, Slack simply supplements existing communications channels, perhaps reducing email use slightly while greatly increasing the messages sent directly through chat. In many others, Slack may exist as “shadow IT,” technology that is used without official sanction. And it’s incredibly popular. Slack’s success has made it the fastest growing SaaS company ever and allowed it to make its way into more than 70 percent of the Fortune 100 companies. Slack’s viral growth is largely due to the way it gathers information into one, centralized hub. Slack lets teams bring all their communication and much of their work into one place, allowing them to compose messages, share files, integrate information from third-party apps, and even make phone calls, all without ever leaving Slack. The Lawyer’s Guide to Discovery and Investigations in Slack Page 6 of 24 Communication in Slack: Workspaces, Channels, Direct Messages, and More Slack organizes communication through “workspaces.” This is the digital space where a team shares communication and files. Companies may have a single workspace, such as acme.slack.com, for the entire organization, or they may have several workspaces organized around function, location, project, etc. These workspaces can be wholly independent of each other or connected through the Slack Enterprise Grid. Workspaces consist of persistent chat rooms called “channels.” These channels can be both public and private. Public channels are open to any team member in the workspace, meaning that almost anyone can join them, view conversations, and search for past content. There is one exception to the open nature of public channels, though: guests. Guests are members of a Slack workspace who do not have full access to public channels. A guest may be a contractor, temp, or third party who is invited in to a workspace for a limited purpose. To join a channel, even a public one, they must be invited in by a workspace member. In addition to public channels, workspaces can contain private channels, which cannot be seen by other members. Private channels are considered “confidential.” Members must be invited into a private channel to participate in the conversation or to search its contents. By default, any team member can create new public and private channels. Slack further allows private communication through direct messages, which can involve as few as two participants and as many as nine. Like private channels, these conversations are limited to invited members. In addition to where communication happens in Slack, the platform also introduces some idiosyncrasies to how communication happens. First, Slack lets individual users “star” messages, channels, and files. A star is meant to mark an item as important. Only individual users can see their starred items in Slack. Users can also “pin” items, marking them for greater attention. Other members in a The Lawyer’s Guide to Discovery and Investigations in Slack Page 7 of 24 channel or conversation will be informed that an item was pinned, and that pin item is then incorporated into the conversation details pane. Users can also “react” to items in Slack. Reactions allow users to respond to a message with an emoji, such as a , a , or a . If starring an item is relatively straightforward, reacting to one is not, introducing a host of interpretative problems that we discuss below. Finally, Slack is a “platform agnostic” product, making communication even more seamless. Because Slack is cloud-based, it can be accessed from virtually any device and platform. Slack works in web browsers, as a desktop app, on mobile devices and even Apple Watch, allowing users to communicate no matter where they are or what device they are using. This, in turn, helps feed the 24/7 discussions that can make Slack so valuable in discovery and investigations. The Lawyer’s Guide to Discovery and Investigations in Slack Page 8 of 24 Apps and Integrations in Slack Slack includes hundreds of integrations with other tools, turning the Slack platform into a centralized repository of information. Google Drive integrations, for example, can create a Slack message every time a new document is created, access to a file is requested, or a spreadsheet updated. Slack’s app directory lists dozens of apps broken down by categories such as file management, finance, project management, security and compliance, and more. The Time Doctor app, for example, tracks user activities and provides statistics on “where time was spent such as viewing websites and applications used when working.” The Stripe app sends messages when charges are made, invoices updated, transfers sent and more. The Spectr app offers real-time legal advice, delivered directly in Slack, from a “professional legal advisor.” If users want a more bespoke tool, Slack’s API also makes it easy to create custom integrations unique to a user’s team.