Wash. high court: E-mail metadata is public record http://bit.ly/bCZVbV #ediscovery
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Wash. high court: E-mail metadata is public record http://bit.ly/bCZVbV #ediscovery
Filed Under: Tweet Archive Tagged With: Court, e mail, ediscovery, mail, metadata, public record, Record
Tiger Woods, Facebook and ESI, oh my! « Lextek – Chicago Lawyer’s Tek Talk
March 27, 2010 By Global EDD Group
Know When To Get Help
If you don’t know the difference between operating system metadata and internal metadata all three members of the panel advise you hire a trusted third-party to collect the data necessary for your case. John Simek, Vice President of Sensei Enterprises, Inc., added that if a small firm is attempting to cut corners on costly e-Discovery by simply asking the resident IT staff of the company you are investigating to properly extract ESI (electronically stored information) – don’t. In most cases an untrained e-Discovery IT person won’t understand the evidentiary impact of the data and won’t know how to best preserve the data. In the worse possible scenario the relevant data for your case won’t be collected and s/he might inadvertently damage or corrupt the data collected to the point where it won’t be admissible in court. United States District Court of Minnesota Judge James Rosenbaum said metadata is thought of as “the black box in the airplane…It is not sacrosanct. It can be changed.” And once it is changed, it can be ruled inadmissible.
Social Media and e-Discovery
Can you submit Facebook pages as evidence? Absolutely. Judge Rosenbaum cited the Rules of Evidence 801 d section specifically while giving his nod of approval to accepting social media comments, posts, and photos that appear on social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook as evidence in a case. Making questions like “Do you have a Facebook account?” and “Do you have a MySpace page” a regular practice during intake and monitoring the plaintiff’s and the defendant’s social networking accounts were strongly recommended by the panelists. For lawyers looking for more e-Discovery evidence John Simek was happy to oblige, he said “Twitter has every single Tweet that was ever made” recorded.
ESI for everyone
United States Magistrate for the District Court in Kansas City Judge David Waxse repeatedly said that lawyers should make a reasonable attempt to become knowledgeable about their client’s ESI. He counseled lawyers to “narrow down the issues in the case” as their first steps in the e-Discovery process, and cited a PDF with specific guidelines for dealing with discovery of electronically stored information.
via Tiger Woods, Facebook and ESI, oh my! « Lextek – Chicago Lawyer’s Tek Talk.
Filed Under: From The News Tagged With: case, Chicago, discovery, ESI, evidence, Facebook, james rosenbaum, John Simek, Judge David Waxse, Judge Rosenbaum, Kansas City, metadata, minnesota judge, sensei enterprises, social networking sites, states district court, Tiger Woods, United States
Court Rules Metadata Part of eDiscovery – BandL Weblog
The inclination of federal courts to require metadata be included with electronic documents obtained through e-discovery seems to be seeping down to the state courts. In a case decided by the Arizona Supreme Court last fall, justices flipped two lower court rulings and found in favor of a defendant seeking some electronic files and their metadata from the city of Phoenix.
The litigation, Lake v. Phoenix, involved a police officer alleging employment discrimination by the city of Phoenix. His attorneys requested the city supply copies of Lake’s supervisor’s notes. They received paper copies of the documents. Suspicious that the evidence may have been doctored, the attorneys demanded the electronic files on which the documents were based and the metadata for those files. The city refused the request, and two courts agreed with the municipality before the case landed in the lap of the state’s highest court.
“The metadata in an electronic document is part of the underlying document; it does not stand on its own,” the justices wrote. “When a public officer uses a computer to make a public record, the metadata forms part of the document as much as the words on the page.”
Filed Under: From The News Tagged With: arizona supreme court, City, city of phoenix, Court, document, electronic files, employment discrimination, metadata, part, Phoenix, supply copies
What is Metadata? « eDiscovery Assistant
I was surprised with the interest in the PST blog posted a few days ago. When you have worked in the software industry as long as I have, too much is taken for granted. Just because someone uses MS Outlook, doesn’t mean they know what a PST is and what important information, other than eMails, it may contain. Knowing this, it is worth taking a few minutes to define metadata and ways it may help with litigation. Like the buildings in the background, metadata is hidden but very real.
Metadata is data about data. For example, in addition to the text of an eMail message or an MS Word document, bibliographic information about the document itself is recorded. It is maintained automatically by the operating system (ie Windows Vista) and, for eMail messages, may include Date Sent, Time Sent, Subject, Text Body, HTML Body, Filename, Author, File Size, File Date, File Time, eMail header information, To, From and other fields depending on the users setup and configuration of both MS Windows and MS Outlook. There are over 150+ metadata fields in a typical MS Outlook capture. Which ones, if any, are relevant to the litigation, only the legal team can answer. What is important is to understand it is available and can be searched like the text in the document itself.
Filed Under: Tech Bytes Tagged With: email, information, metadata, metadata fields, ms outlook, ms word document, Outlook, subject text, text, users setup
