Litigator's Guide to Metadata - Codemantra.net

Absent party agreement or court order specifying the form or forms of production,production should be made in the form or forms in which the information is ordinarilymaintained or in a reasonably usable form, taking into account the need toproduce reasonably accessible metadata that will enable the receiving party tohave the same ability to access, search, and display the information as theproducing party where appropriate or necessary in light of the nature of theinformation and the needs of the case.The Sedona Principles Addressing Electronic Document Production, Second Edition (June,2007), Principle 12 (emphasis added).The crucial factors are burden and cost balanced against utility and relevance. The goal shouldbe a level playing field between the parties in terms of their ability to see and use relevantelectronic evidence.So where do we draw the line? Begin by recognizing thatthe advent of electronic evidence hasn’t changed thefundamental dynamics of discovery: Litigants are entitled todiscover relevant, non-privileged information, and relevancePeriodically re-assess theadequacy of preservation andproduction and act to meetchanged circumstances.depends on the issues before the court. Relevanceassessments aren’t static, but change as new evidenceemerges and new issues arise. Metadata irrelevant at the start of a case may become decisivewhen, e.g., allegations of data tampering or spoliation emerge. Parties must periodically reassessthe adequacy of preservation and production of metadata and act to meet changedcircumstances.Metadata MustsThere are easily accessible, frequently valuable metadata that, like the information collected bythe traffic cop, we should expect to routinely preserve. Examples of essential system metadatafields for any file produced are:Custodian;Source Device;Originating Path (File path of the file as it resided in its original environment);Filename (including extension);Last Modified Date; andLast Modified Time.Any party producing or receiving ESI should be able to state something akin to, ―This spreadsheetnamed Cash Forecast.xls came from the My Documents folder on Sarah Smith’s Dell laptop andwas last modified on January 16, 2011 at 2:07 PM CST.‖One more metadata ―must‖ for time and date information is the UTC time zone offset applicable toeach time value (unless all times have been normalized; that is, processed to a common timezone). UTC stands for both for Temps Universel Coordonné and Coordinated Universal Time. It'sa fraction of a second off the better known Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) and identical to Zulu10