Guide
Modern enterprises increasingly depend on a diverse ecosystem of cloud-based collaboration platforms—such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and Google Workspace—to conduct daily business operations. These tools have revolutionized the workplace by enabling real-time communication, fostering remote and hybrid work environments, and streamlining cross-functional collaboration across departments and geographies. However, while driving agility and innovation, they also introduce unprecedented complexity to legal discovery.
Additionally, each platform has its own retention policies, export limitations, and contextual nuances—factors that can significantly affect how information is captured and interpreted in legal or regulatory scenarios. Without the right tools and processes, organizations risk overlooking critical details, violating chain-of-custody requirements, or failing to meet compliance obligations.
Whether your organization is preparing for litigation, responding to an audit, or conducting an internal investigation, adapting your eDiscovery strategy to reflect today’s communication landscape is not only advisable but essential for protecting your organization and achieving successful outcomes.
eDiscovery in the cloud refers to the process of identifying, collecting, preserving, and reviewing electronically stored information (ESI) from cloud-based systems. Unlike traditional enterprise systems, where communications were centralized and relatively easy to retrieve, today’s collaboration platforms produce massive volumes of unstructured, decentralized, and constantly evolving data. A single conversation may span multiple threads, include emoji reactions or file attachments, and be dispersed across private messages, group chats, shared drives, and video meetings. This level of fragmentation poses a serious challenge to legal teams tasked with preserving, collecting, and reviewing data in a defensible manner.
Why does this matter today? Most enterprises rely on these platforms for day-to-day operations. Conversations that once took place over email are now buried in Slack threads or Teams meetings. If this content is not identified and preserved correctly, organizations risk non-compliance, legal exposure, and lost evidence.
Traditional eDiscovery was built around linear records—email chains, file paths, and static documents. But modern tools don’t follow this format. Collaboration platforms generate data that is fluid, multi-threaded, and dispersed. For example, Slack conversations are often split across channels, direct messages, and threads, each with different retention settings, privacy rules, and metadata formats. Applying the same discovery approach used for email to Slack is like trying to fish with a net in the desert—it’s ineffective and risks missing key evidence.
One key issue is context. In a tool like Slack or Teams, a single message often does not mean much unless it is read within the full thread. Native exports might omit deleted messages or lack reaction history, making it difficult to reconstruct what was actually said. Metadata—such as timestamps, user edits, and access logs—is critical for establishing a chain of custody but is often fragmented or missing in traditional exports.
Non-compliance with industry regulations or mishandling legal holds in these platforms can result in sanctions, spoliation claims, or outright case dismissal. To avoid such risks, attorneys must be equipped with sophisticated eDiscovery data tools that understand the structure and nuances of collaborative platforms.
Slack eDiscovery poses unique challenges because of how Slack organizes its collaborative data. Unlike email, which flows linearly, Slack messages are nested within threads, dispersed across channels (public and private), and intermixed with direct messages and emoji reactions. Some messages may be edited or deleted. Others may exist only in a temporary cache depending on a company’s retention policy.
A major challenge is that Slack’s native export options vary based on the plan level. Standard plans may only export public channel content, while Enterprise Grid plans allow for full data exports—assuming the correct legal and administrative permissions are in place. Even then, exported data may be in JSON format, which lacks human readability and can strip away critical context.
Organizations often turn to third-party Slack eDiscovery solutions to ensure defensibility. These tools allow for more granular search, targeted legal holds, and full-thread preservation—something native Slack exports cannot always achieve. Legal professionals working with these tools must ensure relevant conversations are not overlooked and that any evidence collected meets legal standards. Refer to this ebook for more in depth information.
Microsoft 365—often referred to interchangeably as Office 365 or O365—is a hub of collaboration activity. Email still plays a role, but modern enterprises also rely on Teams for chats and meetings, SharePoint for document collaboration, and OneDrive for personal files. Each of these applications contributes to a sprawling digital footprint, making eDiscovery efforts far more complex than a simple Outlook inbox search.
Microsoft offers native tools like Purview and Advanced eDiscovery, which help legal teams identify and preserve data across Microsoft 365. However, limitations still exist. Permissions are often granular and difficult to navigate. Conversations in Teams may appear fragmented in exports, making it hard to reconstruct the full picture. Legal holds may not apply uniformly across applications, especially when dealing with shared workspaces in SharePoint or synced documents in OneDrive.
To improve outcomes, many organizations pair Microsoft’s native tools with third-party platforms that offer deeper integrations, real-time holds, and audit logs that bolster defensibility. Legal teams could benefit from working with attorneys who understand these systems and how to surface discoverable content without breaching privacy or compliance obligations.
Like Microsoft 365, Google Workspace consolidates multiple communication channels in one location under one roof: Gmail for email, Drive for documents, Chat for instant messaging, and Meet for video conferencing. For legal teams, this creates a decentralized landscape that demands careful navigation.
Google Vault is the native eDiscovery tool designed to help organizations search and retain data across these applications. While it does a good job covering Gmail and Drive, its capabilities within Chat and Meet are more limited, especially regarding context and metadata. For instance, meeting recordings and live captions may not be automatically retained unless specific settings are enabled. Chat conversations in private threads may not be searchable depending on retention rules.
Exported data from Vault often comes in disparate formats, making review cumbersome and time-intensive. Legal professionals managing eDiscovery Google processes must understand how to interpret complicated JSON or MBOX files and correlate them with user behavior. With the help of eDiscovery-focused tools and knowledgeable counsel, organizations could reduce the risk of missing key data or violating compliance requirements.
Zoom has become synonymous with remote work and virtual meetings. However, from a legal perspective, every recorded meeting, chat log, and transcript may constitute discoverable evidence. That’s why Zoom eDiscovery is gaining traction in legal circles, especially in matters involving internal investigations, compliance, or intellectual property.
Zoom offers options to retain recordings, in-meeting chat, post-meeting summaries, and transcripts. However, retention settings are often customizable at the user or admin level, meaning some critical data may be purged unless proactively preserved. Additionally, privacy permissions can impact what data is accessible, especially in meetings involving external participants.
Legal teams looking to export Zoom data must be mindful of these variables. Transcripts may need to be verified for accuracy, chat logs matched to participants, and recordings checked for completeness. Utilizing Hanzo’s eDiscovery tools for Zoom-specific workflows could help ensure that all relevant media is gathered legally and efficiently.
In today’s digital workplace, collaboration does not stay within a single platform. A conversation might begin in Slack, move to a Zoom call, and wrap up with document edits in Google Drive. That’s why cross-platform eDiscovery is not just a luxury—it’s essential for preserving interrelated data from various origins.
A unified eDiscovery strategy should include centralized legal hold management, platform-specific collection methods, and consistent audit trails. Maintaining a defensible chain of custody across platforms can prevent challenges in court and strengthen the reliability of the evidence.
Modern eDiscovery tools also leverage AI to enhance review workflows. Automated tagging, relevance prediction, and duplicate suppression can reduce the manual burden on legal teams. While these technologies don’t replace attorneys, they empower them to work faster and smarter.
The ideal eDiscovery solution for modern collaboration data must do more than search inboxes. It must be able to access in-platform conversations, preserve dynamic metadata, and maintain context across threads, reactions, edits, and deletions. Hanzo offers several purpose-built solutions designed with this in mind:
This tool helps with early case assessment by surfacing the most relevant Slack and Teams conversations without requiring full data exports. It’s perfect for quick-turn internal audits, investigations, or compliance reviews—speeding up review time and reducing costs.
With direct integrations into Slack, Microsoft 365, and Google Workspace, Illuminate enables legal teams to perform in-place searches, apply legal holds, and export data while preserving context. It streamlines workflows and helps teams meet tight discovery deadlines without sacrificing defensibility.
Chronicle acts as a living archive that captures collaboration data exactly as it appeared in the platform. With immutable records and full-thread replays, it provides long-term legal protection and transparency for internal investigations. This is especially useful for organizations with high compliance risk or active litigation.
Using tools like those in Hanzo’s suite, organizations could ensure comprehensive, defensible eDiscovery processes across all modern platforms, reducing litigation risk and enhancing operational resilience.
The corporate dialogue has migrated from long‑form email threads to a constellation of micro‑messages, live documents, and streamed meetings. That shift accelerates productivity but complicates discovery. Traditional, email‑centric tools overlook critical context, stumble over retention quirks, and expose organizations to sanctions.
Modern matters demand purpose‑built solutions that can see Slack emojis, replay Teams edits, capture Google Docs comments, and synchronize Zoom chat with video. Hanzo’s suite meets those demands by unifying legal hold management, delivering context‑rich exports, and archiving collaboration data in an immutable, review‑ready form. By embracing cloud‑native eDiscovery practices, legal teams protect their organizations, contain costs, and present courts with the complete, defensible story—no matter where or how it was told.
Ready to modernize your eDiscovery workflow? Request a demo today and discover how Hanzo helps you navigate Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Workspace, and Zoom with confidence—capturing every crucial detail while staying fully compliant.
