A Northern District of Indiana court just built a second formula for giving context to short Microsoft Teams messages, a three-day calendar window borrowed from an unrelated case, because neither party gave the Court a workable formula of its own. The lesson: propose your own solution, or the court will import one from wherever it can find one, and you won’t control what it looks like. A certification mistake almost cost the motion outright, and even though the Court let it slide, that same mistake still cost Valcrum its fees. Reading time approximately 10 minutes.

Case: Valcrum, LLC v. Dexter Axle Co., No. 3:24-cv-190 Court: Northern District of Indiana | Decision: Discovery Order resolving four separate questions: certification defect excused, Rule 30(b)(6) motion denied, timeliness argument rejected, motion to compel Teams messages granted in part on narrower terms than requested, fees denied | Judge: United States Magistrate Judge Scott J. Frankel | Decided: June 15, 2026
Read the full order on Minerva26 →

By Kelly Twigger

Podcast | Transcript

A Second Formula for a Recurring Problem

Short, informal chat messages, whether Slack or Teams, don’t carry context the way email does. A search-term hit on a five-word Teams message tells you almost nothing about what was actually being discussed, and when parties don’t agree on the context for production, courts have had to build a remedy out of nothing, because the Federal Rules were written for a world of email attachments, not threaded chat.

We first saw a real answer to this in Lubrizol Corp. v. IBM Corp., back in 2023: a message-count formula, full production of threads of 20 messages or fewer, and the 10 messages immediately before and after a responsive hit in longer threads. That formula wasn’t the Court’s own invention. It was Lubrizol’s own proposed protocol, and IBM never came back with any burden data to challenge it, so the Court just adopted what Lubrizol asked for.

Valcrum, LLC v. Dexter Axle Co. hits the identical underlying problem, out of the Northern District of Indiana. But this time, neither party handed the Court a formula, and the outcome turns almost entirely on two procedural fights that had nothing to do with Teams messages at all.

Case of the Week

The Factual Background

The underlying dispute is a trademark and trade-dress fight over a hubcap design for medium-duty trailer axles. Valcrum says Dexter Axle started copying the red color and hexagonal shape of Valcrum’s hubcap after Valcrum terminated a supply agreement between the two companies. What’s in front of the Court for us to examine is a discovery fight over Dexter Axle’s Teams messages in that matter. 

Dexter Axle’s rolling production ran through mid-2025, producing individual Teams messages as standalone items, exactly as it kept them from individual mailboxes, with nothing connecting any of them to a larger conversation. Nearly a year later, a new production volume organized messages into full chronological threads for the first time, and that’s the moment the missing context became visible to Valcrum’s counsel. An individual Teams message doesn’t announce that it’s missing its surrounding conversation. There’s nothing to flag until you see what a threaded version actually looks like, unless you understand how the technology works and what you should be entitled to under Rule 26.

That triggered a motion to compel two distinct things: the entirety of the Teams messages, reorganized into full threads, and unredacted copies of the threads Dexter Axle had already voluntarily assembled. The order resolves four separate questions, in sequence, and each one has key lessons for litigators creating and implementing discovery strategy.

A Certification Mistake that Cost the Client Greenbacks

Local Rule 37-1 in the Northern District of Indiana requires a certification that the parties tried to work things out before filing a discovery motion, and lets the court deny the motion if that certification is missing or defective. Valcrum’s certification cited the Indiana Trial Rules instead of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, so technically it didn’t satisfy Local Rule 37-1.

This isn’t the kind of mistake that ends a case. If the Court had enforced it strictly, the practical result would have been an administrative one: file a corrected certification and bring the motion again. But the Court didn’t even make Valcrum do that much — it chose to excuse the defect, because Valcrum had documented months of genuine back-and-forth with Dexter Axle, and Dexter Axle had made clear it wouldn’t produce anything further no matter what. Further conferring wasn’t going to fix anything, so the paperwork error didn’t matter.

But the Court’s decision came at a cost for Valcrum. That same certification failure resurfaced at the very end of the order as one of the reasons the Court declined to award Valcrum fees under Rule 37 for the motion to compel, even though Valcrum won real relief on the Teams messages. Get your certification right and cite the correct rule every time. It’s an easy mistake to avoid, and here it turned into a cost even after the Court forgave it.

Compare that to Valcrum’s separate motion to compel a Rule 30(b)(6) deposition, decided in the same section of the order. There, the actual back-and-forth was thin: a couple of emails restating positions, an offer to talk further that never happened. No certification defect this time, just no substance behind the conferral. The Court denied that motion outright. Same order, same section, two meet-and-confer problems, and the deciding factor both times was whether the record showed real conferral, or futility, not whether a form was filled out correctly. Document every meet-and-confer effort as you go, contemporaneously. That record is what saved the Teams motion. Its absence is what sank the deposition motion.

The Duty to Supplement Includes Context in Short Form Messaging

Dexter Axle’s second defense was timeliness: Valcrum’s motion should be thrown out because it came too late, since Dexter Axle’s production was largely finished by January 2025 and any delay after that was Valcrum’s own fault for waiting to send follow-up requests.

But the Court rejected that argument as an improper attempt to shift the burden onto Valcrum while Dexter Axle ignored its own ongoing duty to supplement. The duty to supplement is automatic under the rules. It doesn’t stop when a deadline passes, and a requesting party doesn’t have to keep re-asking just to preserve the right to compel later.

Here’s the piece I think matters most, and it’s not something the order says outright: this ruling implicitly treats providing context for Teams messages as a form of supplementation under Rule 26(e), even though nobody has framed it that way in the case law I’ve seen. Given a party’s ongoing obligations under Rule 26, I think that’s the correct read, adding context to an incomplete short-form production should count the same as producing a missing attachment. But that’s my own extrapolation from where this order lands, not a stated holding, and I wouldn’t assume every court agrees yet. Watch out for that issue, and be prepared to provide sufficient context in the production of short form messaging whether from Teams, Slack, WhatsApp or any other platform. 

The Technology Gap that Cost Valcrum the Threads

On the Teams messages themselves, Valcrum asked for two separate things — the entirety of the messages, reorganized into full threads, and the unredacted threads Dexter Axle had already voluntarily assembled.

In opposition to producing the threads, Dexter Axle explained to the Court that Microsoft Teams stores this short form data as individual messages sitting in each custodian’s own mailbox, not filed away as a single thread. That’s a real technical explanation, and combined with Sedona Principle 6, that a responding party is best positioned to manage its own production, it was enough for the Court to decline full reconstruction. So Valcrum was left with the individual messages and no way to combine them. 

Dexter Axle’s explanation of how Teams stores messages was accurate, but incomplete in a way that might have changed the outcome for Valcrum. Microsoft’s own compliance tool, Purview eDiscovery, has a feature called conversation threading built specifically to take scattered individual messages and reconstruct them into a full transcript, likely exactly how Dexter Axle produced its own threaded volume. The underlying storage may be scattered, but pulling it back together isn’t a massive undertaking; it’s a built-in feature of the same platform that scattered the messages. And Dexter Axle’s last production contained threads, meaning that Dexter Axle had the capability to produce threaded messages. Nothing in this record suggests that Valcrum raised either point, and those are real gaps. Before you’re the one requesting Teams or Slack reconstruction, know the technical architecture of the platform well enough to test whether the other side’s burden claim is actually accurate.

The Court didn’t let Dexter Axle off the hook entirely, though. It rejected Dexter Axle’s argument that its original production was already sufficient, quoting Kim v. Cushman & Wakefield U.S., Inc. which found that keyword searches alone are inadequate for Teams data — because conversations there are shorter, more informal, and less likely to include full names than email. So some remedy was necessary. But the Court was equally clear that Valcrum’s own proposed fix, producing all Teams correspondence, was too broad. Neither party had given the Court a workable middle ground, so it reached outside the record entirely, to Deal Genius, LLC v. O2Cool, LLC, where a different judge in an unrelated case had already ordered Teams messages produced on a three-day window around disputed communications.

That’s the real lesson in this ruling. Lubrizol proposed a formula and got it. Valcrum proposed none, asked for everything, got called too broad, and had a formula imported from someone else’s case instead — one that has nothing to do with how Dexter Axle’s teams actually communicate. If you don’t come up with your own proposed solution, tied to how your opponent actually uses the platform, the court will find one from wherever it can, and it may not fit your data at all.

Valcrum did prevail on the second issue of the unredacted threads that Dexter Axle had already voluntarily assembled. The Court found Dexter Axle’s redaction objections were boilerplate, overbroad, unduly burdensome, vague, ambiguous, and not proportional, with no elaboration behind any of it. The Court called that out directly, citing McGrath v. Everest National Insurance Company: a party’s reflexive invocation of the same baseless, often-abused litany of objections, without any actual specificity, gets waived.

What to do this week

Get your certification right, every time, and don’t treat it as boilerplate. Cite the correct rule in the correct jurisdiction. Valcrum’s counsel didn’t, and even though the Court excused it, the same mistake likely cost Valcrum the fees it would otherwise have recovered.

Document every meet-and-confer effort as you go, contemporaneously. That record is what saved the Teams motion despite the certification defect, and its absence is what sank the deposition motion in the same order.

The duty to supplement runs in both directions. Producing parties can’t point to a requesting party’s silence as an excuse to stop supplementing, and a claim that most documents were gathered early can cut against you, not for you. Requesting parties don’t have to keep re-asking to preserve the right to compel later, but should follow up on discovery issues within a couple of weeks of receiving a production, not months later.

Don’t assume a standalone short-form message is complete. Ask early and directly whether what you’re looking at is an individual pull or a complete thread, and if you’re arguing prejudice from missing context, tie it to something concrete, specific depositions or specific witnesses, not a general complaint.

Know your platform’s architecture well enough to argue it from either side of the table. If you’re resisting reconstruction of data, be ready to explain how the platform stores the data and what tools are available to reconstruct it to make it reasonably usable. That’s the standard. If you’re hearing that explanation, don’t just accept it; know the platform yourself well enough to test whether the burden claim is actually accurate.

Build a sampling mechanism into your ESI protocol before the fight starts. You can’t know your opponent’s communication patterns in advance. Propose a sample of custodians or date ranges, calibrate a context window against it, and build in a meet-and-confer path to revisit the window later, so reopening it is a conversation between counsel, not a new motion. Like most modern sources of discovery, short form messaging requires iteration to get to a proportional and reasonable production of information. 

What to watch next

Be on the look out for whether courts start treating context for short-form messages as an explicit Rule 26(e) supplementation obligation; this order gets there implicitly but nobody has said so directly yet. And watch whether the message-count formula from Lubrizol and the day-based formula from Deal Genius, now imported into Valcrum, start to consolidate into a real standard, or whether every court keeps reaching for whatever’s sitting nearest.

Listen to the full episode

This week’s Case of the Week walks through all four questions in Valcrum v. Dexter Axle: the certification defect and its fee-stage cost, the timeliness fight and the open question about what counts as supplementation, and the technical gap in the Teams-architecture argument that nobody raised. Listen on Meet and Confer →

See Minerva26 in action

Minerva26 is the discovery intelligence platform that connects case law, rules, and real-world workflows. We tag decisions like this one under Instant Messaging, with sub-filters for Slack, Teams, and WhatsApp, so when you’re negotiating a context mechanism into your next ESI protocol, the formulas courts have actually ordered are already organized for you. Book a 30-minute demo

Related on Minerva26:  Lubrizol Corp. v. IBM Corp. · Kim v. Cushman & Wakefield U.S., Inc. · Deal Genius, LLC v. O2Cool, LLC · James v. Cerebras Systems, Inc. · Schulte v. LinkedIn Corp.

This decision is available on the Minerva26 platform with full issue tagging. If you’re a litigator navigating discovery strategy and want to stay ahead of decisions like this one, visit Minerva26.com to learn more or schedule a demo. Every decision covered on Case of the Week is searchable by issue, jurisdiction, and judge.

Kelly Twigger is CEO and founder of Minerva26 and Principal at ESI Attorneys. She has been a discovery strategist and practicing attorney for nearly 30 years. Case of the Week is a segment of the Meet and Confer podcast, breaking down one recent ESI discovery decision each week into practical strategy you can use.

The post Why Agreeing on Short Message Data Context is Critical first appeared on Minerva26.