Your legal hold process has gaps. The question isn't whether they exist, it's whether you'll discover them during routine compliance review or after a judge issues sanctions.
The Waymo LLC v. Uber Technologies, Inc. case made this painfully clear: Uber settled for $245 million in equity after failing to preserve evidence in ephemeral messaging apps. U.S. District Judge William Alsup ruled that Uber actively used disappearing-message tools like Wickr to discuss stolen trade secrets and evade discovery. The company withheld the "Jacobs Letter," which alleged Uber designed technology specifically to thwart legal discovery.
That settlement figure represents what happens when legal hold practices don't keep pace with how your employees actually communicate.
Identifying the Gaps
Three patterns emerge when organizations face spoliation penalties:
Ephemeral messaging apps operate outside your legal hold scope. Signal automatically deletes messages on user devices with no central server records. WhatsApp combines end-to-end encryption with decentralized storage across personal devices. Microsoft Teams scatters messages, edits, and file links across Exchange and SharePoint, while Slack's threaded replies and third-party integrations make isolating a single custodian's data nearly impossible.
Decentralized data storage creates preservation gaps. When employees store work product on personal devices, cloud storage accounts, and local desktops, your server-focused legal hold misses critical evidence. Auto-delete routines for emails, texts, and Slack messages continue running unless you explicitly disable them. Third-party vendors, consultants, and contractors control data you're legally responsible for preserving.
Vague hold notices guarantee incomplete preservation. If your legal hold notice doesn't specify which data types and date ranges custodians must preserve, they'll make their own decisions about what matters. When you can't quickly identify all relevant custodians, especially those using non-standard communication methods, people with vital information never receive hold instructions.
What This Means for Your Team
Your current legal hold process probably addresses email and shared drives. It likely doesn't address the collaboration tools your teams use daily.
Consider what happens when litigation triggers a legal hold in your organization. You issue notices to identified custodians. They preserve their email and documents on file shares. Meanwhile, the project team has spent six months collaborating in Microsoft Teams, where threaded conversations reference SharePoint documents that have been edited multiple times. A consultant working from their personal laptop contributed to Slack channels that auto-delete after 90 days. Two executives discussed strategy in Signal messages that disappeared the moment the conversation ended.
Your legal hold captured none of this.
The risk compounds when you realize that preserving email alone doesn't preserve the specific version of a hyperlinked document that someone shared at a specific time. The email exists; the evidence doesn't.
Federal Rules of Civil Procedure Rule 37(e) requires you to take "reasonable steps" to preserve electronically stored information when litigation is reasonably anticipated. Courts evaluate reasonableness based on your organization's sophistication and resources. If your competitors have solved ephemeral messaging preservation and you haven't, your "reasonable steps" defense weakens.
Action Items by Priority
Immediate (This Quarter)
Map where business-critical communication actually happens. Survey department heads to identify which collaboration tools teams use for substantive work discussions. Don't rely on IT's approved-software list, ask what people actually use, including personal devices and consumer apps.
Audit your legal hold notice template. Does it explicitly name Microsoft Teams, Slack, and mobile messaging apps? Does it define "relevant data" with enough specificity that a non-lawyer custodian knows what to preserve? Add concrete examples: "All Teams chat messages, including edited and deleted messages, and all files shared in those chats."
Disable auto-delete features in collaboration platforms where business discussions occur. Work with IT to turn off message expiration in Teams and Slack for channels where your organization conducts substantive work. Document this change in your Records Control Schedule.
Near-term (Next Six Months)
Implement automated capture for dynamic collaboration data. Manual legal holds fail when data changes faster than custodians can copy it. Tools that provide in-place preservation capture conversations, threads, attachments, edits, deletions, and reactions exactly as they appeared to the user, in real time. This approach preserves full custodial context without requiring employees to export data manually.
Build a custodian identification protocol that accounts for non-standard communication. When litigation involves cross-functional projects, your custodian list must include contractors, vendors, and consultants who participated in relevant discussions. Map project teams to communication channels before you need to issue a hold.
Create targeted collection parameters. Over-collection increases storage costs and expands your exposure during review. Define specific spaces, custodians, channels, and date ranges rather than preserving entire systems. Your Records Freeze should be surgical, not comprehensive.
Strategic (Next Year)
Centralize legal hold management across platforms. When legal teams can initiate or release holds and preview communication sources without pulling entire systems offline, you reduce the gap between IT and legal that creates preservation failures. Single-point management also creates defensible documentation of what you preserved and when.
Train custodians on preservation obligations before litigation arises. Annual training should cover which tools require special preservation steps and what "preserve in place" means for decentralized data. Make it clear that moving files to personal storage doesn't satisfy a legal hold.
Document your legal hold process in writing. When a court evaluates whether you took reasonable steps to preserve evidence, your written procedures demonstrate intentional compliance. Include platform-specific preservation steps, custodian identification workflows, and quality-control checkpoints.
The $245 million Uber settlement proves that legal hold blind spots carry measurable costs. Your organization's communication tools have evolved. Your legal hold process must evolve with them.
