Yes — collaboration messages are discoverable business records, and courts now expect them in production. The hard problems are scope and preservation: retention settings silently destroy history, and a conversation is only intelligible if threads, edits, reactions, and linked files are collected together.
Collaboration data is ordinary discovery now
Slack, Microsoft Teams, and similar platforms hold the conversations that email used to hold — decisions, admissions, and timelines in the participants' own words. Courts treat them as they treat any electronically stored information: if messages are relevant and proportional to the needs of the case, they are discoverable, and a party that cannot produce them has a preservation problem, not an exemption.
The retention trap
The most common failure is silent and happens before anyone is thinking about litigation. Workspace administrators set retention policies — often short ones, sometimes per-channel — and the platform deletes on schedule with no one watching. When the duty to preserve attaches, those settings must be found and suspended for the relevant custodians and channels, exactly as a document-retention policy is suspended under the litigation-hold cases. "The platform deleted it automatically" is a description of the failure, not a defense to it: the obligation was to change the setting.
Plan tiers matter too. Lower tiers of these platforms cap message history or export capability, and an upgrade mid-dispute can surface history the parties believed was gone — or confirm it was never retained at all. Knowing which is true requires looking, not assuming.
Collection is harder than export
A raw export is not a usable production. Collaboration messages come as structured data — threads, edits, deletions, emoji reactions, @-mentions, and links to files that live elsewhere — and a message stripped of that context can be affirmatively misleading. A "yes" is evidence of very little until you know which question in which thread it answered. Defensible collection captures the structure: thread relationships preserved, edit history where the platform records it, and linked content resolved, with the method documented so the production can be explained and defended later.
Scope discipline matters in the other direction as well. Channels are group spaces; collecting an entire workspace to find one custodian's statements sweeps in thousands of irrelevant conversations. A well-drafted ESI protocol settles custodians, channels, date ranges, and search methodology before collection starts, which is cheaper than fighting about it after.
What to do now
Identify the workspaces and their retention settings first — that is where the clock is running. Suspend automated deletion for relevant custodians and channels, document what the settings were and when they changed, and collect through methods that preserve message structure rather than screenshots or manual exports.
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