Corporate litigation covers a wide array of topics and business issues; most Fortune 500 companies have hundreds if not thousands of active cases so it's not as prevalent as you might think in the overall company case load.   I had the opportunity to have dinner with four judges last month, so I asked them how often this came up in their court rooms ... and the surprising answer was once a year or less often.  Employment matters and internal investigations have the most potential to have timeline elements down to the file date/time stamp, but contract and commercial disputes have very little potential in this area.
 
Any case, I don't think the issue is comfort, it's complexity in preserving, collecting, reviewing and producing.  To retain metadata perfectly/completely during collection is pretty complex and expensive.  To preserve metadata in a forward-facing issue that involves thousands of employees daily work product can be crippling to a company.   Because the duty to preserve extends to all the potentially relevant information a company may have -- far beyond its official records -- the metadata net can be pretty tough to set.
 
To make the matter more complicated, if a party agrees at the meet and confer to produce email in its native format, it's probably not native in PDF  ;~)     
 
Deidre
       
 
________________________________

From: Records Management Program on behalf of Maureen cusack
Sent: Wed 12/13/2006 9:37 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [RM] American Bar Association position on ethics of metadata use & clawbacks



Deidre said

<I think one of the stickiest issues for the coming year or two will be the
issue
of relevance and metadata -- the test for producing information is its
likely
"relevance" to the issue at hand.  Most judges will say that file date/time
stamp is rarely relevant .>

If in litigation questions hinge on "who knew what when" which I understand
comes up a lot, then wouldn't you guess that,  as metadata becomes
demystified in our society over time, lawyers may become more comfortable
relying on it to prove "who knew what when". For non-email electronic
records, I mean, since email has the date/time visible and capturable as
.pdf



Maureen Cusack, M.I.St.

http://www.maureencusack.net

"There are two kinds of adventurers; those who go truly hoping to
find adventure and those who go secretly hoping they won't."
                        -Rabindranath Tagore

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