The Challenge of Ephemeral Messages
Your legal team just received a preservation notice. Opposing counsel wants "all relevant communications" about a contract dispute. You've suspended deletion on email, but what about the Slack threads where your procurement team negotiated terms? The Teams channels where engineers discussed technical specs? The mobile messages your sales director sent from the road?
Modern workplace platforms now include features like auto-delete settings and temporary chats. These tools weren't designed with eDiscovery in mind. They were built for speed and collaboration. This creates a fundamental tension: Should you preserve ephemeral communications the same way you preserve email, even when the platforms are designed to make messages disappear?
This isn't a technical question. It's a risk calculation that divides legal and IT teams.
The Case for Comprehensive Accessioning
The preservation-first camp argues that if it's a business record, you need to capture it. Period.
They point to the volume of substantive work now happening outside email. Microsoft Teams reportedly surpassed 320 million monthly active users and is used by more than one million organizations worldwide. That's not just water-cooler chat; it's contract negotiation, product decisions, and customer commitments. When your team conducts business through collaboration platforms, those communications carry the same evidentiary weight as email.
The risk of spoliation is real. If you implement a legal hold but can't preserve chat messages because they auto-delete, you've got a defensibility problem. Courts don't care that your platform defaults to ephemeral retention. They care whether you took reasonable steps to preserve relevant electronically stored information (ESI) once litigation became foreseeable. Under FRCP Rule 37(e), you need to show you took reasonable steps to preserve. "We didn't think to turn off auto-delete" won't hold up.
Accessioning advocates also argue that consistency matters. If you preserve email but not chat, you're creating gaps in the record that opposing counsel will exploit. Even if that's not true, the optics are terrible.
From a practical standpoint, Accessioning platforms can now capture chat context in ways that make review manageable. You're not just getting a stream of disconnected messages; you get threads, channels, participants, timestamps, and attachments. That structured preservation makes ephemeral content no harder to review than email, assuming you've got the right tools in place.
The Case for Selective Preservation
The opposing view starts with a cost-benefit analysis. Comprehensive Accessioning of every chat platform, mobile message, and temporary workspace creates massive data volumes without proportional legal value.
Critics of blanket Accessioning point out that most chat traffic is operational noise. It's "Did you see my email?" and "Running five minutes late" and emoji reactions to meeting invites. Unlike email, which people still treat somewhat formally, chat platforms encourage casual communication. Preserving all of it means your review team wades through thousands of irrelevant messages to find the handful that matter.
There's also the technical reality. Chat platforms store data differently than email systems. Messages may be distributed across workspaces, channels, and direct messages with varying retention policies. Some platforms let individual users set their own deletion schedules. Capturing everything requires integrations that may not exist, APIs that change without notice, and ongoing maintenance that strains IT resources.
The selective-preservation camp argues you should focus Accessioning resources on high-risk communication channels. Preserve the channels where regulated discussions happen or where litigation is likely. Apply legal holds to specific workspaces when you receive a preservation notice. But don't try to archive every platform preemptively.
They also question whether comprehensive Accessioning actually reduces risk. If you preserve everything, you create a larger attack surface for discovery. Opposing counsel can request broader searches. You've got more content to review, more privilege calls to make, more opportunities for inadvertent disclosure. Sometimes less ESI means less risk, not more.
Where Organizations Actually Land
In practice, most organizations end up with a hybrid approach driven by their risk profile and resources.
Highly regulated industries tend toward comprehensive Accessioning. If you're in financial services, healthcare, or government contracting, you can't afford preservation gaps. You implement platform-wide Accessioning for major collaboration tools and accept the storage costs as part of doing business in a regulated space.
Organizations with lower litigation risk often take a trigger-based approach. They don't archive chat platforms by default, but they have the capability to implement targeted preservation when a legal hold notice arrives. They've mapped their communication landscape, identified which platforms host substantive business discussions, and documented how they'd preserve content if needed.
The middle ground involves selective always-on Accessioning. You preserve specific high-risk channels: the executive leadership team workspace, the channel where your product team discusses customer commitments, the compliance group's communications. You let general-purpose chat remain ephemeral unless a specific legal hold requires broader preservation.
What matters most is that you've made a conscious decision, not just accepted platform defaults. If your Teams channels auto-delete after 30 days because that's what IT set up three years ago and nobody's revisited it, you don't have a defensible position. If you've assessed the legal risk, documented your retention approach, and implemented controls that match your policy, you're in far better shape even if you're not preserving everything.
Our Take
Comprehensive Accessioning is the safer legal position, but it's not always the right business decision.
If you've got the budget and the technical capability, preserve your major collaboration platforms the same way you preserve email. The spoliation risk and the evidentiary gaps aren't worth the storage savings. Tools exist now that make chat Accessioning manageable. The integration challenges are solvable.
But if resources are limited, focus on risk-based preservation. Identify where substantive business decisions actually happen and preserve those channels. Document your rationale. Make sure you can implement targeted legal holds quickly when litigation arises. That's defensible, even if it's not comprehensive.
What's not defensible is ignoring the question until you're facing a preservation notice and realizing your procurement team's entire negotiation history disappeared last month because nobody thought to check the retention settings.
Map your communication landscape now. Decide what you're preserving and why. Then make sure your legal hold process can actually execute that plan when it matters.
