Litigator's Guide to Metadata - Codemantra.net

work. In general, the richer the information in the evidence, the less likely it is to surviveproduction in TIFF.Despite these shortcomings, lawyers cling to cumbersome TIFF productions, driving up e-discovery costs. This is troubling enough, but raises a disturbing question: Why does any lawyerassume he or she is free to unilaterally suppress--without review or proffer of a privilege log—integral parts of discoverable evidence? Stripping away or ignoring metadata that’s an integralpart of the evidence seems little different from erasing handwritten notes in medical recordsbecause you’d rather not decipher the doctor’s handwriting!In Williams v. Sprint/United Mgmt Co., 230 F.R.D. 640 (D. Kan. 2005), concerns aboutprivileged metadata prompted the defendant to strip out metadata from the native-formatspreadsheet files it produced in discovery. The court responded by ordering production of allmetadata as maintained in the ordinary course of business, save only privileged and expresslyprotected metadata.The court was right to recognize that privileged information need not be produced, wiselydistinguishing between surgical redaction and blanket excision. One is redaction followingexamination of content and a reasoned judgment that particular matters are privileged. The otherexcises data in an overbroad and haphazard fashion, grounded only on an often-unwarrantedconcern that the data pared away might contain privileged information. The baby goes out withthe bathwater. Moreover, blanket redaction based on privilege concerns doesn’t relieve a party ofthe obligation to log and disclose such redaction. The defendant in Williams not only failed toexamine or log items redacted, it left it to the plaintiff to figure out that something was missing.The underlying principle is that the requesting party is entitled to themetadata benefits available to the producing party. That is, theproducing party may not vandalize or hobble electronic evidence forproduction without adhering to the same rules attendant to redactionof privileged and confidential information from paper documents.The requesting party isentitled to the metadatabenefits available to theproducing party.Resolve Production IssuesLike other forms of electronic evidence, metadata may be produced in its native and near-nativeformats, as a database or a delimited load file, in an image format, hosted in an online databaseor even furnished as a paper printout. However, metadata presents more daunting productionchallenges than other electronic evidence. One hurdle is that metadata is often unintelligibleoutside its native environment without processing and labeling. How can you tell if an encodedvalue describes the date of creation, modification or last access without both decoding the valueand preserving its significance with labels? Another issue is that metadata isn’t always textual. Itmay consist of no more than a flag in an index entry—just a one or zero—wholly without meaningunless you know what it denotes. A third challenge to producing metadata lies in finding ways topreserve the relationship between metadata and the data it describes and, when obliged to do so,to present both the data and metadata so as to be electronically searchable.When files are separated from their metadata, we lose much of the ability to sort, manage andauthenticate them. Returning to the voice mail example, unless the sound component of the17