Law Students

Casenote Competitions: Getting Rid of Metadata

By Timothy Lee, Jr

If you’re like most 1Ls, you probably had visions of beaches, mojitos and relaxing following your final spring exam. But somewhere along the way, you started to hear rumblings of a casenote competition. Fast-forward now 10 days after my last final, and I’m still in the library, still reading cases, and still not drinking mojitos. Welcome to Law School (again).

While I don’t have any tips on how to write a good casenote (I’m trying to figure that one out myself) I did run across something that might get you an extra point or two (or at least prevent you from losing points). The whole thing about a casenote competition is that it’s supposed to be anonymous. That way editors of law reviews can read all 200+ submissions and curve them on the dreaded 1L curve without anyone accusing them of playing favorites. To keep things anonymous, you’ll be told to double check to make sure you haven’t typed your name anywhere in the document. So you’ve checked and double checked. Done, right? Nope! You still have to strip out metadata.

Metadata is that weird behind the scenes info that each document keeps automatically. It includes things like your name, date, what word processor you used, and so on.

The last thing you want is to lose a point or two because an editor glances at the metadata and sees your name glaring at them. How do you erase this info? I did a little bit of searching and found this gem from Boston University: It’s an easy to follow three step process to erase the basic metadata from a PDF.

When you’re done, it should look like this!

Enjoy!

Note: Because the method uses Automator, it requires you be running OS X 10.5 (Leopard) or later.

Full post as published by Mac Law Students on May 21, 2010 (boomark / email).