Latest Articles
- All Relevant Employee ESI Must Be Disclosed
- Law Firm Sanctioned For Email Spoliation
- Carefully Choose Search Protocol In Litigation
- Court Orders Inspection Of Hard Drive After Delays In ESI Disclosures
- Archiving The Internet – One Snapshot At A Time
- Purposeful Email Deletion Results In Sanctions and Scolding
- Finding ESI Search Efforts Unclear, Court Requires More Discovery
- New Article Explores Metadata
- Suspicious Email Results In Dismissal Of Employee’s Claims
- New Opinion Illustrates How Quickly ESI Issues May Proceed in Court
Editor Bio
Gregg Mayer is a journalist and lawyer with a keen interest in the rapidly evolving world of e-Discovery. Gregg has published numerous articles, including writing for law journals and the American Bar Association. Gregg served as editor-in-chief of the Mississippi Law Journal. Before practicing law, Gregg worked as a newspaper reporter for six years.
Company Looks For Sneaky Changes In Metadata
Posted by Gregg Mayer on Tuesday, March 4th, 2008
One reason parties in litigation seek metadata – the hidden data about data inside ESI – is to look for sneaky modifications to documents.
This is exactly what one company is looking for in an ongoing lawsuit in the state courts of Texas.
In A&W Development, LLC v. Honza, the two sides are involved in a real estate dispute about the wording of a contract assignment for the purchase of land. A&W alleges that the Honzas changed the wording of a contract after the two sides had an agreement. The wrong contract was signed and executed, according to A&W.
Here is how the court explained it:
Under the terms of the partial assignment actually executed, A & W retained “the right to purchase a portion of this property for the construction of a street with an approximate width of 78′ in a North to South direction of approximately 413′.”
However, an earlier draft of this partial assignment makes no reference to such “purchase,” and A & W contends that the consideration the parties negotiated for the partial assignment took into account the consideration the Honzas should receive for the street referenced in the assignment.
In an effort to prove the contract was changed, A&W is seeking metadata off the Honzas’ office computers to compare alleged contract modifications with the diary entries that the Honzas’ kept during the time the parties negotiated:
A & W seeks the metadata from the Honzas’ hard drives because it wants to identify the points in time when the partial assignment draft was modified in relation to the diary entry. This goes to the issue of whether the Honzas altered the partial assignment after the parties concluded their agreement but before the document was presented for execution.
The Texas Court of Appeals recently affirmed the trial court’s decision to let a third-party consultant take a mirror image of the Honzas’ computer hard drives and look for the metadata.
Although there appear to be no Texas decisions addressing a request for access to an opponent’s computer hard drives, a body of state and federal decisions has emerged and has established a fairly uniform approach for such requests….Federal district courts have consistently held that electronic data stored on computer hard drives, including “deleted” files and related data, is subject to discovery.
Consequently, if there were any improper changes, the metadata will have the answers. Understanding the consequences of metadata is just as important as proper email archiving in today’s business world.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.