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New Document Metadata Changes In Microsoft Office 2007

By Randal Farrar
June 29, 2009

Microsoft Office documents contain information other than the actual content that is intended for the reviewer to view and edit. This information is called document metadata. In some cases, the disclosure of this document metadata may have potential for harm or embarrassment for a law firm.

The document metadata contained in a Word document other than the intended text doesn't necessarily create risk of adverse disclosure, because some document metadata is necessary for formatting or macro automation of the document. However, some document metadata, such as Tracked Changes, may be used to share among cooperators, but should not be shared with adversaries or in some instances clients, because it contains author and date metadata.

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