Q&A: How FTI Technology’s Universal Messaging Platform Helps Clients Overcome WeChat E-Discovery Challenges

Chelsea, you’ve mentioned that clients are starting to see a significant uptick in emerging data sources coming into scope in e-discovery matters. Can you explain what emerging data sources are and provide examples of which ones have become most prevalent in China?

Chelsea Ye, Senior Director, FTI Technology: Yes, an emerging data source is any cloud-based platform, collaboration tool or messaging application used for business purposes and communications. Across Asia Pacific, the most known are Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Box, Dropbox, Slack, WhatsApp, WeChat, DingTalk and Lark. While most people are familiar with these tools and use them with ease in day-to-day work and personal communications, their backend complexities and technical nuances have created several persistent challenges in the context of disputes, discovery and regulatory compliance. We’ve noticed a trend of increased challenges specifically relating to preservation, collection, analysis and review of information from WeChat, which is the predominant communication application in China with more than 1 billion monthly active users.

Moreover, data and document volumes are growing all the time, and the variety of emerging data sources is expanding rapidly via new platforms and also in the numerous formats that exist within each platform. 

Can you describe some specific challenges you’ve seen?

Baron Zhao, Senior Managing Director, FTI Technology: One challenge our clients encounter is the difficulty that out-of-the-box e-discovery tools have with processing and analyzing Chinese characters, especially in chat messages. Many of the tools often used in e-discovery matters are simply not sophisticated enough in handling the unique nuances of the Chinese language. This creates time-consuming work for legal teams to manually review information and ensure everything relevant has been appropriately captured. 

Additionally, by their nature, chat messages are not well-suited to standard e-discovery workflows, which were designed for collecting, analyzing and reviewing emails and documents. Chat conversations often drift between multiple topics, include emojis, reactions and abbreviated language, and span unconventional time periods. They may also involve cross-channel communications, in which a conversation moves from chat to live discussion to email and back to chat. These features make it difficult for e-discovery professionals to pinpoint context and relevance over an extended thread. The result is often teams spending excess time (and cost) poring over large volumes of irrelevant or out-of-context short messages to find the information they need for the matter at hand. 

What is FTI Technology’s Universal Messaging Platform? How does it help solve these challenges?

Ye: The Universal Messaging Platform is a proprietary solution designed and implemented by FTI Technology’s emerging data sources experts to support processing of language characters and fast, defensible access to data from platforms including WeChat, WhatsApp and Viber. It allows our e-discovery and investigations professionals to deliver efficient workstreams that identify, preserve, collect, process, review and produce information from dozens of cloud-based emerging data sources. Our experts are expanding the solution’s features all the time, and several enhancements were added to solve challenges relating to WeChat specifically. These included adding capabilities for complex language characters and enabling integration with leading forensic collection tools in China. 

Zhao: Additionally, our solutions provide pre-built connectors and an intuitive interface for managing data integrations and exporting data to simplify forensic processes for data from WeChat and other applications popular in the region. Universal Messaging Platform supports WeChat collection and export formats, providing a way for data from the application to be integrated with e-discovery tools and workflows. 

The solution can also ingest Chinese characters in chat messages, so they can be formatted for compatibility and feasible analysis within standard e-discovery tools. This includes our unique approach to density analysis and segmentation of short-form messages from WeChat to determine logical, matter-specific conversation breaks for chat threads involving key custodians and/or keywords, providing relevant context and optimizing documents for downstream review.

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The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and not necessarily the views of FTI Consulting, its management, its subsidiaries, its affiliates, or its other professionals.