Chat and messaging eDiscovery in Australia

Workplace communication in Australian organisations has shifted heavily to Slack, Microsoft Teams, WhatsApp, and text messaging - and that data is discoverable. Messaging records now feature routinely in commercial litigation, employment disputes, regulatory investigations, and royal commissions, where informal messages often prove more candid than email.

Chat data is harder to review than documents for a few reasons:

• Conversations flow continuously with no natural start or end, so they must be grouped into sensible reviewable units

• Shorthand, emoji, reactions, edits, and deletions all carry meaning

• Context - who was in the channel, when, and what was linked - can matter as much as the text

• A single point is often fragmented across many short messages

Australian discovery obligations apply to this material like any other: if messages are relevant and within a party's control, they generally need to be preserved and reviewed, including on personal devices used for work. Early preservation matters, since retention settings on messaging platforms can delete data automatically. Privacy handling under the Privacy Act 1988 and the Australian Privacy Principles also applies, particularly where personal conversations sit alongside work ones on a device.

A defensible workflow preserves messages with their metadata, groups conversations for review, and keeps every message linked to its source. Because the format suits AI well, many teams now use summarisation and fact extraction to turn long threads into reviewable evidence quickly.

For a practical walkthrough of handling messaging data, see How to Include AI Chat History in eDiscovery.

Claira is an AI eDiscovery platform that applies summarisation and fact extraction to chat and document review. See it in action.