Inaugural Benchmarking Report Finds Collaboration Data Severely Straining Corporate Legal & IT

Collaboration platforms have quietly taken over the enterprise. Employees jump between Slack threads, Teams channels, Zoom recordings, Miro boards, Google Docs, and a fast-growing layer of AI-generated content from ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini every day. The average organization actively runs 10 of these platforms and accumulates 48TB of collaboration data per matter, with volumes climbing 46% every year. Discovery processes designed for email and shared drives never anticipated any of this, and the strain is starting to show.

Key Findings

Onna's 2026 Collaboration Data Risk & Readiness Report, the first comprehensive benchmark of how organizations preserve and collect collaboration data, surveyed 241 senior legal and IT leaders. The findings reveal a discovery function operating well past its design limits and identify several critical challenges that legal and IT departments now face:

• Collection coordination is a hidden cost center. Organizations spend 26 hours per matter on average coordinating collection. 55% report at least 16 hours, and 14% spend more than 51.

• Accurate collection is virtually nonexistent. Only 2% of collections hit the correct scope. Incomplete scope forces recollection in 36% of cases, and uncertainty or inadequate tooling pushes teams to over-collect in another 39%.

• Cost overruns are the norm. Four in five organizations say collaboration data drives cost overruns, and a third say it happens often.

• Data volumes are outpacing management capabilities. Enterprise data doubles every 21 months. Organizations now manage an average of 48TB of collaboration data, growing 46% annually.

• IT dependency creates bottlenecks. Nearly 70% of organizations rate their IT dependence at 7 out of 10 or higher. Collection requests that route through IT often wait days or weeks.

• New data sources derail collections. Teams uncover new data sources mid-collection in 39% of matters.

The AI Content Inflection Point

The report makes it clear that AI-generated content has emerged as a pressing challenge, one that most organizations have yet to address.

"We've hit an inflection point with AI-generated content," said Eric Harmon, CEO of Reveal. "It's now the largest and fastest-growing data source in discovery, but until recently, organizations had no way to preserve and collect it at the hold stage. Forward-thinking legal teams recognize that they need technology that can handle both traditional collaboration data and AI-generated content with the same defensible, streamlined workflow."

Anyone who lived through the early days of mobile messaging in discovery will recognize the pattern. A new data source emerges, employees adopt it faster than legal can write policy, and by the time a preservation obligation lands, the relevant content sits scattered across personal accounts and ephemeral logs. Repeating that pattern with generative AI, where prompts and outputs can carry significant evidentiary weight, would cost organizations dearly.

The Path Forward

Organizations that standardize workflows, deploy purpose-built technology, and align legal and IT tightly collect faster, overrun budgets less often, and defend their work with more confidence. The pattern holds across industries and organization sizes.

Onna, a platform purpose-built for corporate in-house teams, standardizes collection across 30+ applications, including Slack, Teams, Google Workspace, Zoom, ChatGPT, and Gemini. No-code integrations let teams preserve in place, collect when ready, and cull early before costs compound.

See where your organization stands. The full 2026 Collaboration Data Risk & Readiness Report benchmarks how 241 legal and IT leaders are managing collaboration data, where the gaps are widest, and what the top performers do differently. Download the report.

Reveal conducted the 2026 Collaboration Data Risk & Readiness Report in partnership with CensusWide between February 24 and April 13, 2026. The survey reached 241 legal and IT professionals in senior and executive-level roles, including Associate/Assistant General Counsel, Chief Compliance Officers, CIOs, CISOs, Heads of eDiscovery, and Heads of Litigation. Participating organizations ranged from 500 or fewer employees to 10,000+ employees across 13 industries.