E-DISCOVERY
Digital Collaboration and Cloud Applications Are Upending E-Discovery By TIM ANDERSON
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oday’s collaboration data landscape is almost unrecognizable from what it was in the recent past. About 83 percent of enterprise workloads live in the cloud; app usage has grown by 68 percent over the last four years; and a Harvard Business Review study found that 89 percent of enterprises use some form of collaboration platform for internal communications. As tools like Slack, Zoom and Microsoft Teams gain momentum — significantly accelerated this year by work from BACK TO CONTENTS
home — the corporate data landscape will become increasingly dispersed. From an e-discovery perspective, this explosion in adoption of new cloud, chat and collaboration tools has created two pressing issues: (1) accessing data residing in disparate platforms and (2) what to do with it once we have it. Beyond those challenges, digital collaboration data is upending the way we approach and conduct e-discovery. In many ways, it is challenging certain aspects of the Electronic Discovery Reference
Model and the way we think about traditional document review. As Slack and collaboration app data continue to proliferate, this will grow more complex. E-discovery teams must be prepared to flex their conventional orientation to data review and learn new ways of incorporating emerging data types into workflows. Before we dig into exactly how to navigate cloud and collaboration data in e-discovery, it’s important to have a solid footing on how the current tools are impacting the creation and flow
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