Metadata and other electronic realities facing lawyers today.

Metadata can be your friend during discovery in a lawsuit, your enemy if it reveals otherwise confidential client or work product information, and is certainly a sign that lawyers are going to have to be even more technologically savvy.

"I really do think it changes the standard of care for lawyers," said Orlando attorney Stephen D. Milbrath of new federal rules on electronic discovery and metadata. "It's elevating our standard of care and it's exposing us to a greater level of risk as lawyers. We have to take care of ourselves as well as our clients."

Milbrath was one of the speakers at "The Metadata Debate: The Ethical and Legal Obligations of Counsel in Reviewing and Producing Electronic Discovery Containing Metadata." The CLE course was held at the Bar's June Annual Convention by the Business Law Section, the Computer/Cyber Law Committee, and the Bar's CLE Committee.

Speakers discussed what metadata is, looked at what experts can recover from electronic documents and computer hard drives, addressed changing rules and rulings on discovery of electronic records, looked at security and protecting electronic data, and reviewed software that can help prevent lawyers from accidentally revealing confidential information in their electronic documents and examine electronic information received in discovery.

"Metadata is from the Greek meta, meaning over, and data, meaning information. Literally, we're talking about data about data, data describing data, or data talking about data," said Boca Raton attorney Joel Rothman.

"My personal view is that metadata is not evil, but one thing that seems to have come out of the debate ... is the concept that metadata is in some way bad or evil," he added. "What is metadata? It's information about a particular data set which describes how, when, and by whom it was collected, created, accessed, or modified and how it is formatted."

That information can include where in a computer system the document is stored, who has accessed it, when it was printed, and similar information, Rothman said.

Metadata is an expanding area, he said.

"There are applications being developed now to track your digital life, what you did, where you went [on the Internet], who you spoke to [online].... It's something that would be valuable in terms of being able to document what was being done at a certain time," Rothman said. "Everyone having a metadata file that tracks their every activity on a computer is not so farfetched."

He also noted that metadata is information that is...