The Slack setting that could have saved Gawker $140 million

By now, it’s old news that Gawker Inc. has been ordered to pay more than 140 million dollars to wrestler Hulk Hogan. No matter how you feel about the verdict, the lawsuit has surprising implications for your team.

One of the pivotal moments in the trial was a video tape of Hulk’s lawyers deposing Gawker editor-in-chief John Cook. In the video, the attorney asks Cook about messages he sent four years earlier in Campfire, a Slack-like messaging tool. In the chats, Cook and his coworkers make a series of jokes about Hogan’s sex tape that would make any HR professional cry.

Max Read, a former Gawker staffer and participant in the chats Cook read, explained; “We’ve gotten so used to talking with our co-workers over Slack that we tend to forget it has an essential difference compared with in-person conversations: permanence.”

Chat ends up being a trap because, unlike email, it feels ephemeral. Messages are typed out in a few taps and scroll off the screen in a matter of minutes. While Slack is off the cuff, it’s also on the record.

At the same time, Slack feels fun. Teams see more cohesion after deploying Slack because it brings the water cooler online. Adding gifs and off-topic conversations to Slack makes co-workers more satisfied. However, it can also create patterns of behavior that can be dangerous.

Whether it’s inappropriate jokes, or other legally sensitive behavior, by default, everything your team says in Slack is saved forever.

Many teams have decided that it’s not worth the headache and discard all chat history after a few months. Tumblr, a Yahoo subsidiary, takes this to the extreme and deletes everything in their Slack history every two days. Tumblr isn’t alone, lots of companies have decided that it’s not worth the legal risk to keep their history around and the Gawker lawsuit is pretty vindicating. No one can subpoena their history because it’s gone. On the other hand, employees can’t see the history.

Teams like tumblr are making a big trade-off. One of Slack’s killer features is its search function’s ability to dig up relevant conversations at the tap of a mouse. Organizations that use Slack end up breaking down silos and creating world class documentation of their work. Having a living, searchable, transcript, is key to delivering on that promise. By deleting history, you’re giving up a big piece of the upside.

A far better option is to instill in your team an understanding of the implications of the things they post to Slack. Don’t post in Slack things that you wouldn’t put in an email and don’t put anything in an email that you wouldn’t want read in court. Slack is a record of our lives at work. It’s worthwhile to be intentional about what that transcript looks like.

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Slash-hyphen is the world’s first Slack consulting firm. Our team helps productive organizations maximize Slack through custom software, architecture consulting and training.