6 Key Questions for Determining a Slack E-Discovery Solution

While most e-discovery solutions in the market can scope, configure, and collect data from Slack and other applications, Global 2000 companies face unique legal challenges due to their size and organizational structure. These challenges tend to require more advanced features than what manual processes (or even basic e-discovery tools) can offer.

The following key considerations will help your legal team in selecting the right e-discovery solution for Slack data collection. 

1. Can you collect Slack conversations prior to 2018?

Litigation is almost always for an incident that happened years prior. Slack APIs underwent a major overhaul in 2018 and, consequently, certain vendor products cannot collect Slack conversations prior to 2018. Be sure to ask the vendor whether their infrastructure allows for collections from before 2018.

2. Can you collect conversations between two specific users?

The ability to collect data in a surgical manner vastly reduces downstream e-discovery process complexity. Litigations like employee disputes often include collecting data between two key custodians, and most vendor products that include chat transcripts collect all the data from a single user to perform a search against. Certain vendors do not target collecting data between only two custodians, leading to accumulated stored data. 

3. Can you add a new channel or user without reconfiguration?

Setting up the configuration for collection is still a tedious process for legal staff. Auto-identification and seamless configuration reduces the need for user intervention, thus reducing reliance on the IT team for collection.

4. Can you process Slack files without any manual steps?

Processing chat files in the readable transcript for e-discovery is still a manual process while using certain vendor applications. The Slack API provides the export file in JSON format which, for certain platforms, must be processed using a third-party tool before ingesting it into the vendor application for further review.

5. Can you collect historical data that a user was a member of?

Litigation is about collecting all the data that the user has access to—not limited to only the current data. The system you choose should be capable of identifying the user’s current and historical channels, and make those data available for purposes of litigation.

6. How can Exterro help?

More than 90% of Exterro’s clients are Global 2000 enterprises. Having worked closely with their legal teams over the prior 10+ years, we understand their issues and work to address their specific pain points. The challenges they face when it comes to handling complex collection can be daunting—but it’s an obstacle that can be overcome by utilizing the right technology.

Exterro’s Partnership with Slack utilizes the latest APIs to collect Slack data for litigation. The integrations between these two industry-leading software solutions provides the user with the capability to collected surgically-targeted data from Slack while decreasing the cost it takes to obtain defensible information.

Read more about the Slack-Exterro integration.