PAST MEETINGS

Thursday, September 23, 2004
Topic:	Metadata - How Much Are You Revealing?
Presenter:	Teresa Johnson Sidely Austin Brown & Wood LLP
Host & Location:	Cathy Angus Sidley Austin Brown & Wood LLP 1501 K Street, NW Washington, DC 20006

Summary prepared by Rochelle Bungie: ALL ABOUT METADATA Cathy Angus from Sidley Austin Brown & Wood LLP hosted our WTF Meeting on Thursday and Teresa Johnson gave the presentation on Metadata. Teresa explained that documents in their electronic format contain hidden information called “Metadata”. This hidden or embedded information is in documents such as Word, WordPerfect, Excel, PowerPoint, Adobe Acrobat PDF files and Email files. This information can include: Tracked Changes/Revision Marks – Additions and deletions shown as redlined text and strikethrough text. Comments – Electronic annotations indicated by colored highlights. Hidden Text – Text that may be displayed or hidden, depending on your Word settings. Undo – Information about recent actions performed on the document. Document Properties – when the file was created, the amount of time spent editing the document; the last 10 authors; and the full filename and path of the computer where these authors made their changes. Some of the more common metadata contained in Word documents are: Attached template Author Category, keywords and comments Company name Custom Properties such as client and matter or docID Date the file was created, last modified and printed Edit time Embedded objects Full name and file path where the document and template reside Graphics and more Hidden text Last 10 authors Manager Residual tracked changes Routing slip Subject Title Versions Teresa said this subject (Metadata) was published in the ABA Journal, July 2004. This is a good article to use to show your attorneys that Metadata is a serious problem. Teresa gave several scenarios of how clients could use your document to challenge the number of billable hours charged by the firm. Listed below are two examples: Example 1: Suppose an attorney used a brief from a former client and modified the information to fit the new client. Then he emailed the file to the new client and claimed that it took him two days of billable time to create this document. The new client opens the document up and goes into the properties (File/Properties/Statistics) and sees that you only spent 45 minutes working on that document. Example 2: An attorney used a boilerplate contract agreement to create a new agreement for a client. He sends the contract agreement along with an invoice stating that it took 4 hours to create this document. When the client received the agreement, he opens it up and does the following: Clicks on the “Insert Menu,” choose “Field”; under the “Field Name”, he selects “EditTime” and clicks “OK”. The amount of time spent editing the document is then inserted at the active cursor location – “30”. The new client sees that you only spent a total of 30 minutes creating that agreement. He now has grounds for challenging the attorney’s billable hours. Example 3: A previous editor of a file has turned on Track Changes but has turned off the displaying of these changes. The file continues to track all changes made, but the editor of the file does not see the changes being tracked on the screen and is unaware that the Tracked Changes feature was on. He sends the document, a Settlement Agreement, to the Opposing Council who turns on the screen display of Track Changes. The Opposing Council could also turn the “Hidden Text” option on (Tools/Options/View/Hidden Text) to see previous changes made in the document. Suppose the attorney originally offered a higher settlement amount and then reduced it in his revisions. Word has a feature that will allow you to recover text from any file. This feature is located in the Open dialog box under “Files of Type”. You change the “Files of Type” to “Recover Text from any File”. Then you click on the document you want to recover and Microsoft will produce a text document showing all of the previous changes – insertions, deletions, made to the document. Word also has “File Versions” which allow you to save a version of the document with the same name inside the file. The document can then be rolled back to previous versions. The individual version history, along with who made the changes is saved within the same document. Not many law firms use Word’s Versions features but someone with unscrupulous intent can turn on the feature and then forward the document to someone else. When the file is returned, the person has a running history of every change made to the document. Metadata exists in other Office applications such as Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. Both Excel and PowerPoint contain file properties similar to Word. Excel has special ways to format cells to be invisible, hide rows, columns and worksheets. PowerPoint has hidden slides, tracked changes, speaker notes and more. Outlook includes settings to track all files sent and to then embed a history or electronic trail. Even though Adobe PDF files don’t have the amount of metadata found in Word files, there still is a substantial amount of information gathered. Some examples are Title, Author (user ID), Document summary, Keywords, File location, Comments and tracked changes if they are contained in the original document. It is important to clean out the original software program’s metadata prior to converting to a PDF format so that the information is not automatically transferred. You can also open the PDF file and apply a password and change “Permission” so that the reader is not allowed to change, copy or extract information from the document. Several resources are available to help you understand how to minimize or eliminate metadata from Microsoft Office applications. Third-party tools for removing metadata such as Metadata Assistant from Payne Consulting Group; Workshare by Kraft Kennedy & Lesser. You can also go to Microsoft.com and review the Knowledge Base articles on the subject “How to Minimize Metadata” and select the appropriate version and application – Word, Excel, PowerPoint. For additional questions, contact Teresa Johnson.