Legal teams are sitting on a ticking time bomb of unstructured data. Slack messages, cloud docs, and private chats hold everything from client communications to sensitive case details, but most of it is scattered, unmonitored, and growing by the second. When litigation hits or regulators come knocking, that lack of control turns into a costly liability.
This is where information governance becomes a make-or-break factor. It's the only way to confidently manage, preserve, and act on the legal data that matters most.
If your team is still treating data governance as an IT issue, it's time to rethink your strategy.
Legal teams don't have the luxury of ignoring data anymore. What used to live in file cabinets now lives across apps, inboxes, chat threads, and cloud drives.
That shift, on its own, might seem manageable. The problem is that most of it never gets tracked, tagged, or even noticed, until someone needs it in a lawsuit, investigation, or audit.
This is where the role of information governance in legal teams starts to show its weight. Information governance refers to how an organization controls, stores, retains, and deletes its data. In legal settings, it means creating a system that protects sensitive information while making sure it can still be found, reviewed, and, if necessary, used in court.
Some goals of legal information governance include:
The importance of information governance has grown, not because legal teams suddenly love structure, but because the amount of unstructured data has exploded. That data often lives in platforms like Google Drive, Slack, Teams, and email, where legal visibility tends to be more or less nonexistent.
Gartner estimates that unstructured data accounts for 80-90% of all new enterprise data, and that number keeps rising. Without clear policies and systems in place, that's a lot of legal exposure just sitting there.
The risks of ignoring governance are very real. Some common ones include:
Regulators are, frankly, not giving anyone a free pass either. Laws like GDPR, HIPAA, PCI, and CCPA carry real fines for non-compliance. That pressure is, in many cases, forcing legal teams to take ownership of how their company handles legal data.
Poor governance doesn't just open the door to penalties. It usually guarantees more work and more cost.
For instance, the broader and messier the data set, the longer and more expensive the eDiscovery process becomes. A bit of cleanup upfront tends to save a lot later.
For legal data management to work well, the right building blocks need to be in place. Without them, policies don't stick, data gets lost in silos, and teams waste time chasing records that should've been centralized in the first place.
Here's a breakdown of the core components:
For example, Onna's platform supports each of these steps in a way that's purpose-built for legal and compliance teams. The system connects directly to cloud-based tools, ingests both content and metadata, and makes everything searchable, even private chats, deleted files, and edited versions.
Getting control of legal data across an entire company isn't simple. That, in itself, tends to be the main reason governance projects stall. Legal data lives in multiple systems, updates constantly, and is accessed by many teams at once. So, without a centralized system, information governance can quickly fall apart.
What works better, in most cases, is building a single point of control. For instance, platforms like Onna give legal and compliance teams one place to find, search, and manage data from Slack, Google Workspace, and Teams. That centralization reduces silos and shortens response times for audits or legal holds.
Some core elements that help teams scale governance include:
That kind of setup doesn't only save time, it tends to reduce human error too. Teams no longer rely on IT to manually pull data or search shared drives. Instead, legal can access what they need directly, knowing it's complete and current.
To meet rising privacy demands, information governance best practices matter more than ever. These often include:
For example, GDPR fines reached €6.1 billion by May 2025. So, legal teams can't afford to work with outdated or incomplete information. Proper systems, built for legal use cases, now do more than help. They're non-negotiable.
Legal teams often think of governance as a checkbox; something you do to avoid penalties. That view, while not wrong, misses what's possible once you put the right structure in place. With more visibility and less clutter, legal teams can actually move faster, make better calls, and lower costs.
The real value shows up when governance starts supporting legal compliance strategies directly. With clear policies and connected data, legal holds can be issued quickly, and investigations become less disruptive. Teams stop wasting time sorting through duplicate records or chasing missing files.
Effective information governance is what separates proactive legal teams from those stuck scrambling during discovery, audits, or compliance reviews.
Onna helps you move fast and stay in control. Our platform connects directly to Slack, Teams, Google Workspace, and more, capturing data and metadata in real time. We apply consistent retention rules, keep everything searchable, and support custom exports for litigation and compliance needs.
Ready to take the pressure off your legal team? Contact Onna to see how we can future-proof your legal data strategy.