PAST MEETINGS

LOCATION: Covington & Burling
1201 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
Washington, D.C.

HOST: Kathy Valentine

TOPIC: Document Security

Whenever you create, open, or save a document in Word , the document may contain content that you may not want to share with others when you distribute the document electronically. This information is known as "metadata". Metadata is used for a variety of purposes to enhance the editing, viewing, filing, and retrieval of Office documents. In this meeting, you will learn what type of metadata is stored with your document and how to avoid or eliminate it before electronically sending it to others.

Covington & Burling created a macro, that removed specific types of metadata from a document. You should review the Microsoft KnowledgeBase article to determine what types of metadata are important to you. The scrubber macro presents the user with check boxes (default is checked) for each option. The user can then determine which metadata components to scrub. After the document is scrubbed the macro saves a copy of the original document and adds the word "secure" to the filename.

Covington & Burling created three different documents to disseminate to their users. The first document is short tips explaining the different types of metadata. The second document is "short and sweet" and goes into a little more detail on metadata. The third document is "long and complete" and explains document metadata in detail.

They presented the document security issue to the users in not only a defensive, but an offensive manner. They suggested that when they get documents from opposing counsel, they check the document for useful metadata. Also don't let your users be quick to blame Microsoft and Word for the metadata issue. WordPerfect is worse because it retains all the undo edit information in a document even after you close the document.

Versions – This is a Word menu item from "File" – "File, Versions …" When Versions are used, the former versions are still attached to the recent version. Therefore, when you send the most recent version to the client, they can actually locate back versions and any comments that you may have added to the file. With all of this extra baggage, they ended up troubleshooting a file that the attorney complained was too slow. They found out that the file had grown to a size of 2 megs because of the versions being turned on. Kathy suggested that we educate our attorneys, explaining to them the disadvantages of what could happen -- (firm being able to see their editing history, etc.) and showing them the advantage – how they could benefit should their opponents neglect to turn this feature off.

WP’s Undo History – WP allows you to record up to 300 instances of undo history. The default is 10 but Kathy said that some attorneys thought that "more" was better. If this is not taken out of the document, others can actually see all the instances where text, footnotes, etc. was deleted from your document.

WP and HTML Files – When a WP document is saved as an HTML document on the Internet, all previously deleted footnotes, etc. are now available. This is what happened with the Ken Starr report. He sent a printed version to Congress, without some of the more graphic details and he put the other version on the Internet. Once it was put out there, the original deleted footnotes, text, comments, etc. was now available to everyone.

Comments and Hidden Text – When the Paragraph Marks in WORD and the Reveal Codes in WordPerfect is not used, hidden comments and text boxes are not displayed. Since attorneys constantly delete text and then later want it back in the document, experienced secretaries, (in her firm) would place the text in a comment box or mark it as hidden. They would usually go back and delete it out when the document went final or was sent out. Unfortunately, most attorneys do not use the Reveal Codes or the Paragraph Marks. Therefore, they would edit a document late at night and send the file out. When this happens, other "educated" attorneys are in a position to read this text.

Document Properties – Most firms, for identification purposes, etc., have the User’s name and company entered in the Document Properties of Word. When an attorney does ghost writing for their clients, this information goes with the document. As stated earlier, someone was able to retrieve this information and this embarrassed both the attorney and the client.

Solution – The IS Department of Covington & Burling now conducts a 30 minute class that explains the above items to their attorneys. In addition, their Programmer created a macro named Scrubber" that does the following:

 Removes all previous Versions;
 Accept all Revisions;
 Remove all Comments;
 Remove all Hidden Text; and
 Remove All Document Properties.

The user has a check box and decides if they want the above options to be deleted or not. They also had an attorney contest to allow the attorneys to name the screen dialog box – they chose the name "Outgoing Document Scrubber".