Here is an interesting note from the February 2009 Information Management
News Wire.

 The first case mentioned states that you are required to produce metadata
associated with an electronic file. What if your business process is to
strip metadata before a record is formally declared. Would you be violating
this expectation?

I used to work for a company whose policy for sending any documents outside
the company network required running a software product over the document
which would strip it of any identifying metadata. The purpose was to be able
to re-use documents from one case to another and strip away any reference to
the former client from underlying metadata before sending along to the new
client. Whenever an e-mail with a document attached was sent you were
presented with a dialog box asking if the attachment should be cleansed of
metadata.

That was only being used in a collaborative work in progress type of
situation where you would send a draft outside the network and take in the
reply. You could control the level of metadata to be stripped and thus allow
track changes to remain but have it search for white font on white
background (an ingenious way to leave text hidden in plain sight
incidentally)  and remove the last 10 users who have opened the document
etc.

Imagine, though, a policy taking it a step further which says “whenever
declaring electronic documents to the records repository, metadata must be
first scrubbed to present a clean document for posterity” With valid
business justification for the policy, however  are you not also consciously
violating case law like that pointed out below.

*Metadata Gains Prominence*
Two recent cases underscore metadata’s growing role in legal discovery.
Records managers and others responsible for preserving and producing
electronic evidence should pay close attention to these evolving
interpretations.
More... <http://www.arma.org/news/enewsletters/index.cfm?ID=3372>

http://www.arma.org/news/enewsletters/index.cfm?ID=3372

copied from the article

While there are many types of metadata, what is commonly sought as part of
electronic discovery is the data that indicate how and when an electronic
document was created, by whom, and when it was last viewed or changed. This
system-created metadata is embedded in the document itself and is not
visible when the document is displayed or printed.


In *Aguilar v. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Division*, a New
York federal judge ruled that companies must produce metadata in litigation,
noting that metadata associated with e-mails and electronic documents should
be preserved, maintained, and produced for discovery.



Many attorneys routinely challenge their opponents' requests for metadata as
"overly broad and burdensome." But the New York court explained that
metadata is important for authenticity of electronically stored information,
and in addition to allowing effective search, sorting, and analysis, has
evidentiary value of its own. Attorneys in the state believe they are seeing
a pattern: courts will compel metadata production if it is requested early
in the case.

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