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<b>Practice Tip:</b> Managing Your Metadata

By Judye Carter Reynolds
March 27, 2007
New amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure ('FRCP') identify electronically stored information, tangible and intangible, as discoverable (relevant, non-privileged) information. To ensure compliance, firms are required to adopt policies regarding the preservation, retention, and destruction of all digital data including their metadata. Litigators are pressed to develop some expertise on the types and locations of document, application and system metadata with the expectation that all metadata may have evidentiary value. The demands are on the IT professionals to deliver a copy or description of all relevant electronic media, their location, and category without delay and be able to substantiate the firm's retention policies.

Metadata

Metadata reveals information about your data. Document metadata includes tracked changes, hyperlinks, hidden text, comments, date, time and 70 other details about the document's production history. Application metadata includes the identifying information about the software application and the third-party tools used to generate, convert, and format the document.

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