A Fortune 500 corporation was required to produce Slack channel communications to a government agency. The request was narrowly scoped to a specific date range, but some channels had a complex participant history — certain members had joined from the channel’s inception, while others left before the relevant messages were sent.
The corporation’s legal team was concerned that the standard Slack export would inaccurately reflect participant metadata, showing individuals as active in the channel even after they had left, creating potential compliance and accuracy issues in the production.
- Default Slack Behavior – Native exports list all participants who have ever been in the channel, without filtering based on join or leave dates.
- Complex Channel History – Multiple participants had overlapping but non-identical participation periods.
- Compliance Risk – Risk of misrepresenting participation to a regulator by including names of people who were not in the channel during the messages produced.
Sandline’s forensic team implemented a custom participant presence analysis as part of the eDiscovery workflow:
- Comprehensive Collection – Conducted a full export from the beginning of the channel’s history through the end of the production timeframe to ensure no data gaps.
- Join/Leave Event Tracking – Parsed Slack’s system events to identify precise join and leave timestamps for each participant.
- Day-Level Accuracy – Applied a 24-hour period analysis to determine exactly who was present for each day’s messages.
- Metadata Refinement – Delivered a custom metadata field in the review platform listing only those participants active during the production date range.
- Accuracy in Production – The final production set accurately reflected only the participants present during the relevant timeframe.
- Regulatory Confidence – The legal team confidently certified the production’s accuracy to the government agency.
- Review Efficiency – Eliminated reviewer confusion by removing irrelevant participant names, reducing noise in the dataset.
- Repeatable Process – The workflow was documented for use in future productions involving Slack or other chat platforms.
By combining forensic collection precision with custom metadata processing, we enabled a Fortune 500 client to produce Slack data with complete temporal accuracy — preserving compliance integrity while streamlining the review process.