Is It Ethical to Look Into Someone Else's Metadata?
An article over at Law.com looks at a significant question facing lawyers in the 21st century: When is it OK to look at the metadata in an adversary's document? The answer is unsurprising (and unsettling): nobody really knows for sure. Metadata reveals information that was not necessarily intended to be saved into the document by the author and/or all others who opened or printed the document by the time it reached the recipient. The Law.com article looks to Bar opinions from the ABA, Maryland, and New York. (The article does not mention the Florida Bar Bar Board of Governors' opinion that reviewing metadata "is something lawyers should not do."
In terms of reviewing metadata, there is a fundamental difference between documents produced by an adverse party that are pertinent to a lawsuit and documents created in litigation by adverse counsel (letters and pleadings sent by email, for example). Any consideration of whether it is appropriate for lawyers to review metadata must take this difference into account.