If you’re looking for a way to get a leg up on your opponent in a case, try looking through the documents your opponent submitted for discovery. But don’t just read the documents. Look at their metadata.
For the uninitiated, metadata is information about a document other than the text of the document itself. Office documents, for instance, contain lots of metadata, including:
- Date of creation
- Tracked changes
- Author information
If you haven’t checked documents for metadata before, try these tips from a 2010 Lawyers Weekly article, which the author kindly let us use.
- Activate the Track Changes feature to read insertions, deletions and comments.
- Search for “white text” (text in a white font set on a white background).
- In Microsoft Excel, look for hidden columns and rows and floating notes.
- In PowerPoint, look for speaker’s notes.
- Check a document’s properties for things like document creation date, author, software used to create the document, and other details.
- Look for extra fields in e-discovery production documents.
- Download a free metadata extractor from the Internet and use it to open files.
While these are useful tactics to use on other people, you don’t want other people using them on you. So “scrub” outgoing email attachments of as much metadata as you can before they land in other people’s inboxes.
You might be thinking “But I already do scrub metadata – from my computer!” Of course, you also send email from your phone, your tablet, a web client on other computers… A workstation-based metadata scrubber isn’t in the right place to catch email attachments sent from all these other places. Workstation scrubbers are, in this era of mobile devices, obsolete.
The only way to ensure your email attachments contain no metadata is to place a “scrubber” between your mail server and the email’s destination. It’s the one “tunnel” every work email you send must pass through.
Certain companies put an actual server beside their Exchange server to scrub metadata on-site. Once you account for the server, setup, training, maintenance and so forth, this server can cost between $10,000 and $15,000.
Looking for a more economical solution? Advanced Legal Systems has partnered with Litera to offer a cloud-based metadata service. We introduced it in May, and we’re eager to tell you about it.
We’ve incorporated a special version of Litera’s Metadact-e product into our offering, so that it seamlessly fits with your other ALS services. The concept is similar to that of services that scan incoming mail to prevent spam and malware from landing in company inboxes. Our solution scans messages on the way out instead of the way in, and scrubs metadata instead of blocking messages.
It’s a cloud solution, so you don’t need to install, maintain, monitor or fix anything. We price it at about four dollars per user per month, which includes upgrades, support and everything else you need for metadata-related peace of mind.
Every law firm needs a metadata scrubber. If you haven’t already done so, check out your options and choose a system for your firm.