More poll results from the 10th annual UF Law eDiscovery Conference! These polls were from two sessions with questions about data sources!

As discussed in the first post, the conference had huge attendance and several of the terrific educational sessions conducted polls. So, I will be covering poll results over the next couple of weeks, thanks to Maribel Rivera who provided me the raw anonymized results from all the polls. So, here are the poll results from two sessions with questions about data sources!

The first of two sessions with questions about data sources was Guidance for Legal Teams from Case Law Decisions in 2022 and the panelists for that session were Mac McCoy, U.S. Magistrate Judge, U.S. District Court Middle District of Florida; Ryan Tilot, Of Counsel, Gunster, Yoakley & Stewart P.A. and Kelly Twigger, Principal, ESI Attorneys LLC.

There was one poll during that session, which had a whopping 1,099 responses. Yowza!! Here are the results of that poll question (technically, a app usage question, but it leads to data sources):

What workplace collaboration tools are you using professionally?

We all knew that the number of Microsoft Teams users has been growing like crazy and this is another poll that reflects that – a whopping 75 percent of respondents selected it as the tool they use. (Side note: why aren’t we seeing more eDiscovery case law involving Teams yet?). Google Apps was a woefully distant second at 9 percent, followed by project management tools at 6 percent, then Slack at 5 percent and chat apps also at 5 percent. Facebook Workplace hasn’t exactly taken the business world by storm at a puny 6 votes. Ouch.

The second of two sessions with questions about data sources was When Data Comes from Everywhere: Integrating Data from Multiple Sources and the panelists for that session were Denise Backhouse, Shareholder, eDiscovery Counsel, Littler Mendelson, P.C.; Rick Clark, Sr. Director, CloudNine; Matt Rasmussen, Founder & CEO, ModeOne; Dan Regard, President & CEO, iDS and George Socha, Senior Vice President of Brand Awareness, Reveal

There were four polls during that session (one of which was a freeform response poll – those have too many choices to graph). For the other three, each had more than 740 responses (range between 744 and 976 respondents). Pretty darn good! Here are the results of each of the poll questions:

What modern data type are you seeing increase the most in your cases?

Close to half of respondents (43 percent of 744 respondents) said “a mix of it all”. And by “all”, they presumably meant smartphone text and chat data (21 percent), corporate chat applications like Slack and MS Teams (19 percent) and social media content (15 percent). Nearly two percent of respondents picked geolocation – intriguing! It would have been interesting to see what the numbers would have been without a “catch-all” choice (maybe next year, we skip that choice?). Putting that choice aside, the other top two choices aren’t surprising.

What is the most common type of data you need from client smart phone devices?

No surprise that “Text Messages / WhatsApp” was by far the top choice with 71 percent of 976 respondents (it probably wouldn’t have changed much if WhatsApp was left off). Much more surprising is that “Email / Calendar” was the second choice with 23 percent – I wouldn’t think mobile devices would be the primary source of that data. “Slack / Teams” (another choice for which the mobile device might not be the first place I’d look) and “Photo Library” each had 3 percent of respondents. What would be an interesting question for next year? Asking about the most common type of data from mobile devices other than text messages. That would be enlightening.

Have you ever had to collect from Video Conferencing software?

A majority – 61 percent of 918 respondents said “No Why would I?, while 39 percent said “Yes – Teams, Zoom, Google Meet, Skype”. On the surface, that seems to imply a lot of people are collecting video; however, I wonder if some selected “Yes” because they have collected any type of data from those platforms. Maybe next time, ask specifically about collecting video from these platforms?

Still creating graphs for other polls, so expect to see a few more posts over the next couple of weeks. Hey, you’ve waited this long!

BTW, what better reason to start getting people ready for next year’s conference? The dates for it are in the graphic at the top of the post!

So, what do you think? Do any of these poll results surprise you? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by my employer, my partners or my clients. eDiscovery Today is made available solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Today should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.