Attorneys & Technology... NOT
I've had a category called "Attorneys & Technology... NOT" for a long time. That's because for a long time I've been aware that attorneys tend to be very VERY slow to adopt technology, and even slower to get it. Years ago, I got an early fax machine from a client in lieu of legal fees. It was 3 months before I could find any other lawyer with a fax machine to send a fax to. Then when I got my first set of books on CD I had librarians from the large firms marching through my office for a demo because I was the only attorney in Santa Clara county with a CD based library.
I've had fun in the past posting some of the situations I've come across with other attorneys and technology - some of which are found on these pages under this category. But this week I had the biggest laugh.
I've been collecting some articles about electronic discovery. It's become a big topic, but I've not had to deal with it much yet. Anyway - there was all this talk about the horrors of meta data and how meta data is being disclosed by accident. So I wanted to read and find out what I need to know to not make these huge mistakes.
For some reason I thought they were talking about something I didn't already know. Just the way the articles were headlined, it sounded like these were mysteries that only the geekiest of geeks knew. So I really laughed when the first article I read talked about (drum roll please)...
Properties in word documents and that the bad guys can read when a document was created and who created it, and if you took a contract from XYZ Corp, their name might be in Properties.
Ummm, no one knew this? Excuse me, get out from under your rock. But I read on. Then they came to a real biggie...
You can turn off "view track changes" but the changes ARE STILL THERE. So that someone might see all of the changes you made. Wow, this is heavy geekiness.
I am glad this information is getting out to the legal community. But I had to laugh that this was the level of the big meta data story. And yes they went on to discuss meta data in .pdf files and other document types. But it was nice to know there wasn't some huge geeky secret that I needed to learn.
