Litigation Support

Lawyers will race to the courthouse to file suit like the proverbial hare, but when it comes to changing their technology habits, they are more likely to emulate the tortoise.

Only with painful slowness have lawyers come to recognize that unscrubbed metadata presents a threat. How many years have we all seen cases where metadata played a critical role and been to lectures where we have been told that it is an ethical duty to scrub metadata to protect client confidentiality?

The progress of the legal profession in adopting metadata scrubbers has been a steady crawl, but we do appear to be making more substantial progress recently. At this point, the 2010 ABA Legal Technology Survey Report notes that metadata scrubbing software is now available at 59% of respondents' firms, up from 46% in the 2009 survey. Unsurprisingly, large firm respondents report the greatest availability (92%, up from 86% in 2009).

While this is good news from an ethical standpoint and smart in an e-discovery world, it is a little scary that, when asked to identify which metadata scrubber they used, a large percentage of respondents said "Adobe Acrobat." While we love this product and constantly recommend it, it is not designed as a metadata removal tool. In fact, we often joke that Acrobat is the "poor man's metadata scrubber" because it does remove MOST but not ALL of the metadata in a document.

If you're looking for a metadata removal tool, our favorite tool for all but the largest firms is Metadata Assistant from Payne Consulting. We've used it for years, as have many of our clients, and it has truly been a workhorse. I know how fast I move (and therefore how fast I can make mistakes electronically) so I am delighted that Metadata Assistant insists on popping up a dialog box asking me if I REALLY want to send out an attachment without cleaning it (and of course, sometimes you do, especially if you are collaborating and using "tracked changes" which cleaning would remove).

Glad to see the legal profession catching on to the necessity of metadata removal. Even a tortoise will ultimately reach its destination.

E-mail: snelson@senseient.com   Phone: 703-359-0700

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