On Thursday, Hanzo and Zapproved co-hosted a webinar entitled "Emojis and the Law: The Real-world E-discovery Challenges Posed by Enterprise Collaboration," with the major takeaway being that smiley faces have many companies trapped between a rock and a hard place.

Actually, it's not so much the smiley faces themselves but the way that they and other popular emoticons register differently across various platforms, which can make preservation and even interpretation of the data a bit of an e-discovery nightmare.

Panelist Evan Gumz, enterprise account manager at Hanzo, pointed out that even something as simple as requesting an emoji pertinent to a case from opposing counsel is rife with the potential for miscommunication.

"Say I want to see all smiley faces [or] winking faces. It might seem straightforward, but are you using the right nomenclature? Are you using the word that would be universally recognized to refer to that?"

He recommended that attorneys in that scenario reference unicode.org, which provides a full listing of all emojis and the different depictions that, say, a smiley face might have across vendors and platforms.

But even if both sides are able to successfully identify the proper emoji, it may all be for naught unless the proper context has been preserved as well. For example, Gumz alluded to the fact that some emojis are dynamic or animated in nature, meaning that a static screenshot may not do justice to something that was originally presented as a dancing ferret.

One option, Gumz noted, would be to use a native preservation method that targets an emoji's underlying HTML source code and can then be used to replicate how that visual worked when it was live on the web.

But sometimes even the best native preservation methods in the world can't capture the full context around the ways that a particular emoji might be regularly deployed in communications within an office environment.

A fish emoji, for example, could be the subject of a recurring and harmless interoffice joke, but establishing that may require organizations to expand the scope of their preservation efforts.

"It's very important to look at what your workplace community is doing because … we have inside jokes and ways to convey meaning and that can really only be seen if your preserve the full context of the messages," Gumz said.

If it's starting to sound like allowing the use of emojis around the office is more trouble than it's worth, keep in mind that pulling the plug isn't so easy either.

Panelist Eric Goldman, a professor of law at Santa Clara University, said the standard conservative advice is for organizations to ban the use of emojis, which he called a "terrible idea."

Ryan Zilm, information lifecycle management adviser at USAA, echoed those sentiments. He indicated that companies who attempt to negate their litigation risks by banning the use of social media or emojis in the office may see their employee retention rates suffer.

"They are actually losing … employees who have been there for five years and are stellar employees because they are taking away their Facebook, their Snapchat or whatever it is they are able to do," Zilm said.

Panelist Ashley Fischer, managing counsel at H-E-B, suggested companies take a more guided approach to regulating the use of emojis and online communications platforms by instituting social media guidelines.

"I think that's coming more and more these days," Fischer said.