Philip Favro
July 11, 2019
Slack is a popular cloud-based team collaboration and messaging platform used by a wide variety of organizations. Similar to other messaging platforms that have grown in popularity, Slack is unknown to many counsel and courts. Nevertheless, content from Slack is increasingly being sought by parties in discovery. A lack of knowledge about Slack or similar technology can lead to complications with preservation, collection, and production. This is apparent from two recent court cases that addressed failures to produce relevant messages from Slack.
June 20, 2019
Cross-border data protection laws are increasingly affecting domestic U.S. discovery proceedings. Globalization has placed discoverable information beyond the boundaries of the U.S. and has often forced litigants to satisfy those laws in order to produce or obtain such information. To meet the challenges of foreign data protection laws, organizations will need to be prepared. As spotlighted in a recent article published by LegalTech News, this includes more effective information governance programs and litigation readiness measures, along with better advocacy on the issues in court.
May 21, 2019
WeChat is an increasingly widespread communication platform whose content is being sought with growing frequency by parties to U.S. litigation. Despite its growing ubiquity, many lawyers either know nothing about WeChat or are not advising clients to preserve and produce relevant WeChat communications in discovery. Failing to do so can be damaging or even disastrous to a party’s claims or defenses. This is evident from the number of recent court cases addressing discovery of relevant WeChat messages and imposing sanctions for preservation or production failures.
May 16, 2019
Emojis have become an important form of evidence in legal disputes. This is evident from the growing number of court cases over the past several years that have addressed issues relating to emojis. While some might scoff at the notion that a grinning, yellow-faced icon 😀 or a “thumbs up” 👍 might constitute admissible evidence, lawyers are increasingly confronting the reality that they need to know how to preserve, analyze, and present emojis as evidence in court.