American Bar Association Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility
Topic: Review and Use of Metadata
Digest of the Committee:
“The Model Rules of Professional Conduct do not contain any specific prohibition against a lawyer’s reviewing and using embedded information in electronic documents, whether received from opposing counsel, an adverse party, or an agent of an adverse party. A lawyer who is concerned about the possibility of sending, producing, or providing to opposing counsel a document that contains or might contain metadata, or who wishes to take some action to reduce or remove the potentially harmful consequences of its dissemination, may be able to limit the likelihood of its transmission by ‘scrubbing’ metadata from documents or by sending a different version of the document without the embedded information.”
Rules of Professional Conduct: ABA Model Rule 4.4 (b)
Cited Opinions:
New York State Bar Ass’n Committee on Prof’l Eth. Op. 749 (Dec. 14, 2001)
Florida Bar Professional Ethics Committee, Eth. Op. 06-02 (September 15, 2006) (the citation is to the proposed version of this Opinion)
The full text is available at http://indianaparalegals.org…