Across companies today, mobile device messaging is quickly usurping email as the primary communication method of business. This migration has pushed many companies to rethink communication retention policies, with many adopting strong guidelines for mobile communication archiving. Public-sector groups have followed this trend somewhat, but not nearly as quickly. A recent report from communications retention group Smarsh found that although 70 percent of public agencies polled allow for staff to conduct official business communication via text, only 46 percent of those organizations have systems in place to capture and retain that communication. The report polled 236 respondents from city, county and state government organizations who work in administration, IT, public records management and communications or marketing. Bonnie Page, Smarsh general counsel and senior vice president of business development, said the lack of systems in place to retain these communications can pose serious litigation risks for these agencies. “So many public agencies are flying without a net. We're seeing more and more examples of agencies running into very public legal challenges—putting taxpayer resources at risk—as a result of ungoverned mobile communications,” she noted. “These are significant gaps, agencies are vulnerable, and mobile phones are everywhere. They are only going to become more prominent for agencies as a means to communicate with immediacy,” Page later added. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, which can force public agencies to turn over public records, seem to concurrently be on the rise. Data collected by The FOIA Project , a nonprofit data source about FOIA requests, finds that FOIA lawsuits jumped 26 percent between 2016 and 2017. Page thinks that this trend is only likely to increase, especially as courts coalesce over a shared idea over what constitutes public records. “We're seeing litigation in every state over whether text messages are public records or not. Every state court that has decided the issue has declared text messages to be public records which are producible unless exempt,” she noted. Most organizations aren't looking to begin archiving their text data. Just 32 percent of those polled said that they expected their organizations would begin to capture text communications by 2020. Twenty percent said their organizations would “likely not ever” begin to archive text, while the majority “didn't know” when their organization would begin to archive text data. For those organizations who do currently archive text data, the length of time it takes to produce those messages for a FOIA request remains somewhat unclear. Forty-two percent of those polled were unsure of how long it would take to produce text data, while 23 percent were unsure if they could produce text message data at all. Page cautioned that agencies' inability to produce these records quickly could conflict with public records law, especially if they rely on cellphone carriers to collect those messages. “Most state statutes give the public-sector entity between 10 and 14 days maximum to produce records. That means that public-sector organizations must have the ability to search and produce records quickly. They cannot do this if they have to rely on the telecommunication carrier. Carriers only retain messages for a short period of time,” she noted.