Since the legal profession put the “e” in “ediscovery,” we’ve had to grapple with new data types. First, there was email, along with documents, spreadsheets, and databases. We learned how to manage text messages, image and video files, and eventually data from collaboration applications like Slack. Now, there’s another frontier: ediscovery of data from productivity and project management tools like those made by Atlassian. 

What Are Atlassian Apps?

Atlassian is an Australian software company that boasts 180,000 customers, including 83 percent of the Fortune 500. Atlassian’s web-based collaboration apps—including Confluence, Jira, and Trello—help teams plan and manage projects, design and build products, and respond to issues from anywhere, without needing to be in the exact location or even the same time zone.

Atlassian apps integrate tightly together and with hundreds of other tools like Slack, Dropbox, and Zoom. They generate and store tremendous amounts of data. For example, you can learn the entire project history, including the start date, completion date, the project team members,  along with detailed conversations and logs about what issues the team encountered and how they resolved those concerns. 

In other words, business communications that used to happen face-to-face in a shared office space or over email now occur via apps like those provided by Atlassian. And just as business emails are frequently relevant to discovery obligations, so too are communications in Atlassian apps. 

That’s where the challenges start. 

Challenges of Atlassian Ediscovery

Web-based applications tend to generate large quantities of data—and one of the fundamental themes of ediscovery is that data volume equates to ediscovery costs. Collecting everything and sifting through it later isn’t cost-effective or sustainable in the long run. 

Data from browser-based applications can also be challenging to incorporate into standard ediscovery review tools. All too commonly, displays of that data strip out its original context, which is crucial to understanding how events unfolded. 

Finally, there is the question of legal defensibility: data that is not admissible in court may be intriguing and may shed light on a dispute, but it won’t help the parties prove their case or establish their defense.

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