Smiley face or grounds for conviction? Over the past few years, emojis have been finding their way into litigation, and in some instances, even making or breaking cases. But while courts have sometimes struggled to interpret what these glyphs mean, e-discovery technology has, for the most part, been able to account for this relatively new type of visual evidence. But that may not be the case going forward.

Many emojis in circulation today are standard ones—they're provided by chat or collaboration software and available to all its users. But an increasing number of software applications, including Slack, allow users to create their own unique custom emojis. And these personalized emojis are much harder for e-discovery tools to handle.