Learn about the challenges associated with cleaning metadata from documents and protecting your organization from the inadvertent disclosure of proprietary information in this new guide on metadata: Meeting Regulatory Challenges: Metadata in Court Submissions. It also includes removal best practices to ensure documents that are emailed or uploaded to court servers do not contain metadata.
For those that are unfamiliar with the term, metadata is information contained within an electronic document that provides additional information about the document itself or certain parts of it, and that generally is hidden from view in the normal display of the document. It is often described as ‘data about your data.’
While the problem of metadata remaining in Word and PDF files has been reported in the mainstream media for years, the US District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania issued a new warning in February that metadata continues to remain in documents being uploaded to the court server and that such data may reveal damaging and confidential information; "It has come to the attention of the Court that Metadata (AKA Hidden Data) within Microsoft Office Word is not being removed from some documents prior to their conversion to PDF format for uploading to the Court CM/ECF server. Please be advised that Hidden Data can be retrieved from PDF documents if the data is not cleaned from the Microsoft Word document prior to conversion."
Workshare has a long heritage of delivering leading technology to manage metadata risks and we are pleased to deliver this best practices paper. Below is a link to the new guide as well as a few other papers on metadata you might find interesting:
Meeting Regulatory Challenges: Metadata in Court Submissions
A Workshare Report
FRCP and Metadata: Avoiding the Lurking e-Discovery Disaster
By Dennis Kennedy
Dangers of Metadata
A Workshare Report