Personal Injury Law

Inadvertent Disclosures - Part IV - Metadata mining can mean mega-trouble.

By Steve Lombardi

What is metadata and why is it important?

Metadata is data about data. It's hidden behind what you see on your computer screen as you look at or type in a document. When you use a similar document from another case and don't scrub-out the metadata, the new document may very well include information from the first case. I'm not going to get into a long drawn out discussion of what data can be in an electronic document because depending on how you have your preference set, how the document was created and who created it the metadata can be quite different. It's safe to say you need to be concerned about metadata you send out with your electronic documents.

How do you check for metadata and scrub it out of the document?

The answer to this question depends on the variables in every case. It depends on the software used, how it is used and how it is set up. Someone in the firm needs to understand metadata, how to check for it and how to scrub it out of the documents. They need training sessions for the secretary and legal assistant pool. The lawyers need to be trained about metadata.

I've included with this outline several programs from Microsoft that are free and that will scrub your documents. Also included is a program that can scrub all of your existing documents without having to open each one. Another article worth reading is Redacting with Confidence: How to Safely Publish Sanitized Reports Converted From Word to PDF., by the National Security Agency. See the attachments.

Full post as published by Des Moines Personal Injury Lawyer on April 09, 2008 (boomark / email).