Lawyers who receive electronic documents are free to look for and use information hidden in metadata – information embedded in electronically produced documents – even if the documents were provided by an opposing lawyer, according to a new ethics opinion from the American Bar Association.
The opinion is contrary to the view of some legal ethics authorities, which have found it ethically impermissible as a matter of honesty for lawyers to search documents they receive from other lawyers for metadata or to use what they find, according to the ABA Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility.
But the ABA committee said the only provision in the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct relevant to the issue merely requires a lawyer to notify the sender when the lawyer receives what the lawyer should reasonably know were inadvertently sent documents. It does not require the recipient to return those documents unread. The committee also made clear that it was not addressing situations in which documents are obtained through criminal, fraudulent, deceitful or otherwise improper conduct.
The ABA committee noted metadata is ubiquitous in electronic documents, and includes such information as the last date and time that a document was saved and by whom, data on when it was accessed, the name of the owner of the computer that created the document and the date and time it was created, and a record of any changes made to the document or comments written into it.
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