eDiscovery Collection for Workday

Wage & Hour Disputes

Collect, Analyze, and Review payroll registers, time‑tracking, and worker history information.

Discrimination & Harassment

Analyze employee relations cases, feedback, and talent reviews. ​

SOX & Financial Audits

Journal entries, approval chains, and Adaptive Planning workbooks.

M&A due diligence

Validate workforce composition, retention metrics, and compensation structures.

The Workday Platform

Workday runs on a single‑tenant‑logical / multi‑tenant‑physical architecture where every customer is always on the same code version and data model. 

Key attributes relevant to eDiscovery:

• Object‑oriented data model (“Business Objects”) with automatic effective‑dated history (auditability).
• “Report Writer” and Prism Analytics expose every field—including custom objects—without additional ETL.
• Enterprise Interface Builder (EIB) for bulk outbound/inbound data in CSV, XML, or JSON.
• Comprehensive SOAP & REST APIs secured via OAuth 2.0 and WSDL‑based service definitions.
• Attachments & Drive store original files (PDFs, scans) linked to transactions with SHA‑1 content hashing.

Extracting Workday Data for eDiscovery & Investigations

Custom Report-as-a-Service (RaaS)

• Access any reportable field delivered in XML, CSV, or JSON formats through a secure HTTPS endpoint.
• Scales flexibly from low to high volumes.
• Always include the Workday ID (WID) along with Effective Start/End dates to build a defensible timeline of changes.
• Append `?format=csv` to the endpoint for quick CSV exports.

Enterprise Interface Builder (EIB)

• Scheduled exports of full tables or delta files containing only changes, available in CSV or JSON.
• Handles high volumes reliably.
• Enable Change Detection to extract only inserts and updates, minimizing data transfer.
• Sign and hash payloads for integrity verification during transport.

Prism Analytics Data Hub

• Pre-curated datasets enriched by blending with external sources, exportable directly to S3 in Parquet format.
• Variable, depending on the blend complexity.
• Ideal for cross-system investigations requiring unified views. Leverages built-in column-level lineage for audit-ready traceability.

SOAP/REST APIs

• Real-time transactional data pulls returned in JSON or XML.
• Suitable for low to medium volumes.
• Filter requests using `lastModifiedDateTime` to avoid full scans.
• Respect the default throttle of 100 requests per minute to prevent rate limiting.

Attachments API / Workday Drive

• Binary documents tied to specific business objects.
• Low volume, focused on file attachments.
• Use `?location=drive` in requests to retain original folder structure and context from Workday Drive.

Preservation Tip: Workday retains audit snapshots indefinitely but purge rules may delete Change Log entries after 24 months. Issue legal hold or clone tenant for “HOLD_2025Q2” to ensure data immutability.

Related Technologies in the Workday Portfolio

• Adaptive Insights (Workday Adaptive Planning) – Enterprise FP&A & planning
• Scout RFP (Workday Strategic Sourcing) – Procurement & sourcing workflows
• Peakon (Workday Employee Voice) – Employee sentiment & engagement analytics
• VNDLY – Vendor & contractor management
• Zimit – Quote‑to‑cash CPQ for services

“Being able to filter and sift through these records so efficiently is an absolute game changer.”

Happy Attorney
Big Law Firm

Company

Workday, Inc. (NASDAQ: WDAY) delivers cloud‑native human capital management (HCM), finance, and planning applications to more than 10,000 organizations worldwide. In its Q1 FY 2026 earnings release (May 22 2025), Workday reported $2.24 billion in total revenue (subscription revenue $2.06 billion), up ≈ 12.6 % year‑over‑year, with a 24‑month subscription backlog of $18.3 billion.

Origin

Workday was founded in March 2005 by PeopleSoft veterans Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri after Oracle’s hostile takeover of PeopleSoft. Over breakfast at a Nevada‑California diner, they sketched the vision for a pure‑cloud ERP suite that would “put people at the center of enterprise software.” The first HCM customers went live in 2006, and Workday completed a landmark IPO in 2012 at a $9.5 billion valuation.