It may not happen today or tomorrow or even next year, but treating hyperlinked files as modern attachments will happen – eventually. Here’s why.

The issue of treating hyperlinked files as modern attachments has been discussed by me in previous posts here, here, here, here, here and here. I received tons of feedback on the topic, with a whopping 72 comments on my first LinkedIn post about it so far (some of which were mine, of course) and received several emails as well with thoughts and opinions. Not surprisingly, there are proponents on both sides of the issue, with burden and proportionality cited as one of the biggest reasons for not doing so.

However, many of those companies who have been fighting treating hyperlinked files as modern attachments need the ability to do so too. Every company will need to have this ability in as many email and messaging solutions as possible. Why?

Because litigation isn’t the only use case where we apply eDiscovery technology and workflows.

In the 2024 State of the Industry Report published by eDiscovery Today and sponsored by EDRM, one question we asked for the second year in a row was “To which use cases do you or your organization apply eDiscovery technology and workflows today?”.

Litigation was (of course) the top choice with 95.7% of 444 respondents. But there were six other use cases with at least 40% of respondents identifying it as a use case for eDiscovery. Let’s look at some of them.

• Investigations: This was the second most popular use case with 82% of respondents identifying it as a use case for eDiscovery. Some of those could be internal investigations (where the investigator may or may not have access to the data stores for the linked files). Certainly, investigators for external investigations (such as government investigations) won’t have access to them. Are organizations going to tell government investigators that “it’s too burdensome” to produce the relationship between emails and hyperlinked files? Yeah, sure – tell me how that works out for you. 😉
• HSR Second Requests: Just over 40% identified HSR Second Requests as a use case for eDiscovery and the productions are to the FTC and DOJ. Again, I don’t think people are going to get very far with a burden argument on that.
• Incident Response and Privacy Requests: These two use cases clocked in at 50.7% and 46.4% of respondents respectively identifying it as a use case for eDiscovery. Both use cases involve locating personally identifiable information (PII) within your organization’s data collection. Can an organization be complete in identifying PII if they can’t figure out an effective way to quickly get to those hyperlinked files? PII is as likely to be in the linked files as anywhere else.

Examples like these illustrate why treating hyperlinked files as modern attachments is already starting to happen. Google announced last December that admins in Google Vault can now export hyperlinked Google Drive content from Gmail messages. And Microsoft has had a similar capability since last Fall (for what they call “cloud attachments”), though it’s only available to Purview eDiscovery (Premium) users so far. Sure, they don’t support legacy data (yet), but it’s a sign that the platform providers recognize the need to pull hyperlinked files to support various eDiscovery and business use cases.

Sure, I get that pulling the hyperlinked file from an email or other message is hard. But you’re not just having to do it for litigation. And the providers are beginning to bridge the gap with technology capabilities to make it easier. That’s why I think that treating hyperlinked files as modern attachments will happen – eventually. There is simply too great a need for it.

If it makes it easier for you, we don’t have to call them “attachments” (even though Microsoft does). I prefer the term “hyperlinked files”. But the need to link them to the messages and produce them and the relationship between them will still be there – for more than just litigation. That’s what I think.

So, what do you think? Do you think treating hyperlinked files as modern attachments will never happen? Or is it inevitable – eventually? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Image created using Microsoft Bing’s Image Creator Powered by DALL-E, using the term “email AND hyperlinks”.

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.