For years, e-discovery professionals knew that new forms of collaboration data would need to be addressed. But only after chat tools became widespread in workplaces over the past year have they realized just how different this data is from everything else they’ve encountered. “We want to talk about things like emojis … but I truly don’t think we have a handle on the chat messages alone,” said Maureen Holland, e-discovery senior service manager at AstraZeneca.

Holland was one of several in-house e-discovery experts at the “Understanding the New Data Set: Implications of Slack, Teams and Other Conversation Platforms for Legal, Compliance and Governance Teams” session at the May’s Legalweek(year) conference. For the panelists, one of the biggest questions with collaboration data is how to deal with its scope. Finding out where such data is being created and stored, for instance, is almost never straightforward.