The disclosure gap: Slack, Dropbox and social media evidence in litigation.
A composite scenario from partnership and shareholder dispute work, details altered, the method real. Two founders of a design agency fall out. In the unfair prejudice proceedings that follow, the respondent's email disclosure is immaculate, and almost empty. The petitioner's solicitors know the business barely used email: the agency ran on Slack, stored client work in Dropbox, and won business through the founders' personal Instagram and LinkedIn accounts. None of that had been disclosed, and none of it was in anyone's mailbox.
Method
- 01Map where the business actually talked. Before any collection, we inventoried the agency's platforms, Slack workspace, Dropbox team account, shared social logins, and advised the solicitors on what disclosure should have included. That schedule became the basis of a specific disclosure application.
- 02Acquire the Slack record. With the order made, the workspace was exported, public channels, private channels and DMs within the permitted scope. Slack's data carries message timestamps, edit histories and deleted-message tombstones; the export showed a private channel named after the new venture, created while both founders were still directors.
- 03Follow the files. Dropbox's event log recorded client artwork folders being shared to an external personal account in the weeks before the split, then unshared afterwards. The share events survived even though the links were gone, and matched sync artefacts on the respondent's returned laptop.
- 04Capture the social record properly. Instagram DMs and LinkedIn messages soliciting agency clients were preserved via the platforms' own account-data export tools, full conversations with timestamps and participant records, not screenshots, and exhibited alongside the Slack and Dropbox timeline.
Outcome
The reconstructed record, solicitation, diverted work and the private planning channel, all on one timeline, reversed the balance of the proceedings. The matter settled on terms that reflected what the platforms recorded rather than what the mailboxes didn't.
Lesson
Disclosure that stops at email is disclosure of the channel the parties used least. Ask early where the business actually communicated, and remember that collaboration platforms keep event logs and edit histories that outlive the messages themselves. A forensic platform inventory at the start of a dispute is cheap; a disclosure application without one is guesswork.