How do your teams keep in touch and stay on top of projects and shared responsibilities in today’s remote work environment? Chances are they’re using at least a few online collaboration platforms like Confluence, Jira, and Trello. Wherever your teams work, are you prepared to capture those business communications to satisfy your ediscovery obligations?

We ask these questions all the time at Hanzo—and lately, we’ve been asking them about the web-based project and document management tools created by Atlassian. 

We took a closer look at these specific applications in a webinar Hanzo presented recently, “Collecting Legally Defensible Atlassian Content And Saving Time Too.” Here’s a quick overview of what we discussed. 

What Are Atlassian Tools? 

Atlassian is an Australian software company that started out building bug and issue tracking software for developers. They’ve now expanded to encompass all types of industries with three primary tools: 

• Confluence, an online workspace for document sharing and collaboration;
• Jira, a work management tool for software teams to track and resolve bugs and issues; and 
• Trello, a digital Kanban board that offers a free, flexible, visual way to manage and organize projects of any type. 

All of these facilitate collaboration and interconnection. Contributors can update a task’s status or comment on documents, tickets, and Trello cards. A team managing a project with Trello might reference a document in Confluence, which itself might be linked to several tickets in Jira. These linkages are central to how Atlassian products work and the benefits they offer. 

Of course, anywhere that business communications occur can be a source for discovery, and Atlassian tools are no exception. That’s where things can get tricky.

Ediscovery With Atlassian Data Is Harder Than It Looks

I get frequent calls about the challenges that companies run into when they try to collect data from Atlassian products or review data that they’ve already collected. There are a few common threads among those calls, such as: 

• there’s no way to preserve Atlassian data in place, so when data is potentially relevant to a pending or anticipated litigation matter, companies must collect that data to ensure that they don’t violate their discovery obligations; 
• many legal teams are just now finding that these data sources are relevant to discovery obligations, so they haven’t yet invested in a dedicated resource or process for managing it; and 
• most of their collection and review efforts so far have been manual and highly time-consuming. 

One of the biggest problems with Atlassian data is figuring out how to identify relevant information. Printing out 4,000 Jira tickets for the review team to sift through isn’t a reasonable or scalable approach, but collecting Jira data through an API doesn’t give a true-to-life contextual experience either. After all, Atlassian products are built on interconnections. Say you have a Trello project with multiple comments and a few links to tickets in an external application like Zendesk. You know the project itself concerns the subject of litigation. Still, if you can’t click through those links and explore Trello’s different lists and cards—not to mention Zendesk’s tickets—it’s hard to say what happened within the project definitively. 

That’s one of the problems that Hanzo set out to solve.

Interested in learning more? 

Check out the webinar—now available on-demand—to see the demo I walked through.

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