As executives and employees increasingly rely on text messages for business-related communications and courts continue to admonish or even issue sanctions for failure to preserve texts, companies have to figure out how to handle and manage employee text messages.

For in-house counsel, this form of communication creates a number of considerations when it comes to e-discovery policies and litigation holds, including sensitivity to employee privacy and now applications that encrypt and sometimes even delete messages.

A 2015 survey of 254 adults in the U.S. found that 80 percent use texting for business and 15 percent indicated that more than half of their text messages were related to business. Meanwhile, courts, acknowledging that “texting has become the preferred means of communication,” have in recent years imposed sanctions when text messages are not properly preserved.