Slack App Slack app on an iPhone. |

One of the biggest modern challenges of e-discovery, along with keeping up with the vast volume of discoverable data that organizations are now producing, is keeping track of where they're producing it. Communications that were once housed in email now have moved over to chat-based platforms, adding a new layer of complexity for attorneys to tackle.

Self-service e-discovery company Logikcull this week announced that the company would be able to search and review content stored in Slack, a chat-based communications tool popular among technology companies and growing in use among other kinds of enterprises.

Logikcull CEO Andy Wilson said the idea for the feature came from the Logikcull's own use of Slack. Since adopting the platform about four or five years ago, Wilson has noticed that more and more employee conversations take place on Slack, and that inter-office email traffic has slowed pretty substantially.

Attorneys managing e-discovery, however, haven't migrated over to these new systems in quite the same way.

“The more common theme [we heard from attorneys] was 'we have not focused on collecting Slack data' because they don't know how to handle it for discovery. That was shocking to us. They're fearing it because they know a lot of communication is going to Slack, and they know there's good discoverable content there, but they don't have a good way of collecting it,” Wilson said.

Drawing data from Slack isn't quite as easy as email-based discovery. Slack's popularity is due in large part to its ability to quickly link across multiple platforms, meaning Slack threads are often rife with lots of different kinds of content. “It's not a single document with attachments all together, it's a non-document form of information,” Wilson said, adding that re-creating and expanding links to outside content remains one of the biggest challenges of Slack-based e-discovery.

Often, Slack links to internally-permissioned systems, adding another layer of confusion.“That is really, really challenging because you have to have all different levels of access to a business,” Wilson said. Law firms, rather, are more likely to get a basic export, meaning they're likely to miss the content of those permissioned files.

Much like social media, Slack's ability to delete or modify posted content can also create some serious headaches for companies. The new Logikcull feature uses metadata to give attorneys information about any modifications to posted content, allowing attorneys to review any potential content changes.

Although Slack's popularity seems to be rising, Wilson said Logikcull users are still primarily loading in email. Wilson hopes though, given the growing prominence of the platform, that that may change soon.

“Slack is a very unusual form of content for discovery. A lot of people are very confused by it. We're trying to remove that confusion. If you do it this way, extracting this data, processing it, it's just like email,” Wilson said of the company's new Slack feature. “We're trying to make it less scary for them.”

“The thing we want people to do is if you're not asking about Slack data you should,” Wilson later added.