Emojis are part of every day life these days. I have friends who cannot send a message without some kind of emoji or gif - I'm sure you know who you are if you are reading this ;).
I believe that we in the eDiscovery space are likely to see more and more emphasis on the analysis of these small images to give us additional insight into things like sentiment and seriousness. There are already some tools out there that will carry out sentiment analysis on text based communications but the context of an emoji can often dictate how a message is meant to be interpreted by the recipient and the existing tools may not be able to deal with that yet.
Tools like Relativity have ways of dealing with mobile data (RSMF parsing etc.) but in my experience, the emoji display function hasn't been as sophisticated as would be required to perform this level of detailed analysis. But that appears to be changing. With over 3,000 officially recognised emojis out there, our solutions providers are beginning to put more time and effort into their platforms' ability to evolve with these technologies. Hopefully soon we can start to develop our own workflows to help our clients in unison with the tools we use to do that.
With new forms of evidence comes new challenges - here's hoping we can work with our clients to embrace the change and use it to our advantage!