How much data is your organization obligated to preserve for ediscovery in a pending or anticipated litigation matter? What steps should you take to preserve that data?

These are pressing questions for any organization that regularly manages litigation. Corporate legal teams must strike a balance between retaining potentially relevant data against the risk of keeping too much. A similar balancing act exists in the benefit/cost analysis to exclusively rely on in-place data preservation vs. habitually collecting data to preserve it. 

The wisest approach, in our opinion, is one that identifies multiple preservation options and fully leverages each instead of using a one-size-fits-all solution. That’s why we’re glad to see that Slack has rolled out a new legal hold capability that enables Slack Enterprise Grid users to preserve Slack data in place. 

What Can You Do With Slack’s In-Place Preservation?

Slack’s legal hold essentially overrides an organization’s Slack data retention policies. When a user places a legal hold, Slack suspends the routine deletion schedule for any messages and files subject to the legal hold. 

Slack’s in-place preservation function is specific to people, not channels or conversations. When an administrator places a hold on a person, Slack gives users the option to retain “all conversations or just the direct messages [that the] member is a part of.” To access the held data from Slack, users must either export the data or access it through the Slack Discovery API. 

What if an individual Slack user tries to edit or delete their messages after the legal hold is in effect? Traditionally, the Slack conversation history file can retain edits and deletions, and the applied retention policies manage the duration that companies keep the records. However, Slack’s new legal hold capability overrides standard retention to preserve all content for relevant conversations. 

Naturally, Slack’s legal hold function also allows users to release a legal hold once a preservation obligation no longer applies. 

Pros and Cons of Preserving Slack Data in Place

As we noted in the introduction, the upside is that it’s always beneficial for organizations to have options as to how they preserve data for litigation. Having the ability to preserve data in place saves organizations the cost of collecting, processing, and storing data that they may not need. 

That said, there are several downsides to preserving Slack data in place. 

1. In-place preservation doesn’t permit targeted preservation. Because Slack’s preserve-in-place function only applies to people, not channels, an organization cannot focus its data preservation on relevant channels or conversations. Instead, it must lock down every conversation that an individual of interest has participated in or had access to. Many of those conversations are unlikely to be relevant or essential to the litigation. 
2. In-place preservation doesn’t control data in shared channels. When organizations use Slack Connect to share message spaces with other organizations, Slack grants control over each message to the organization that created that message. In other words, an organization could set a much shorter retention schedule for its own messages and files within a shared channel, irrespective of the schedule used by the other organization in the conversation. Slack’s legal hold function does not override a partner organization’s retention—or deletion—of its messages. As a result, users who rely on in-place preservation cannot ensure that they will capture all of the content from a shared channel.
3. In-place preservation doesn’t protect channels from deletion. There’s another potential hiccup with Slack’s in-place preservation capability. Suppose a Slack user who’s subject to a hold actively participates in a particular channel. If that channel is deleted at some point while the hold is pending, Slack warns customers that its message and file data from deleted channels will not be saved.

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