Legal metadata

[Patrick Durusau <patrick@durusau.net>]

Friends,

While looking for more information on legal metadata use cases I ran 
across the following. It is "on topic" but strictly for your amusement. 
And yes, I did check the source and the article appears to be an 
official Florida Bar News article from *January, 2006.*

*****

*FLORIDA BAR BAFFLED AND UPSET BY METADATA* . . . According to the 
/Florida Bar News/ 
<http://www.floridabar.org/DIVCOM/JN/jnnews01.nsf/8c9f13012b96736985256aa900624829/c3f75b4e10e94f78852570e50051b23e?OpenDocument>, 
the Florida Bar's Board of Governors wants to ban the practice of 
looking at metadata in electronic documents. Said one board member, “I 
have no doubt that anyone who receives a document and mines it . . . is 
unethical, unprofessional, and un-everything else."

At its latest meeting, the board voted unanimously for a motion stating 
that lawyers should not look at metadata. The board also referred the 
following two questions to the Professional Ethics Committee of the 
Florida Bar:

    The first is whether it is unethical for a lawyer to mine metadata
    from an electronic document he or she receives from another party.
    The second is whether an attorney has an affirmative duty to take
    reasonable precautions to ensure that sensitive metadata is removed
    from an electronic document before it is transmitted.

According to the article, several of the Florida board members hadn't 
heard the word "metadata" until the meeting in which they swiftly voted 
to take action against it. For more background on lawyers and metadata, 
see my recent posts at the /Illinois Trial Practice Weblog/, "Electronic 
Discovery: 'Metadata' Becomes a Sexy Word 
<http://www.illinoistrialpractice.com/2005/11/electronic_disc.html>," 
and "Avoid Embarrassment: Learn About the Metadata You're Creating 
<http://www.illinoistrialpractice.com/2005/12/avoid_embarrass.html>."

Thanks to a reader for the link.
*****
From: http://www.legalunderground.com/2006/01/florida_bar_baf.html

Hope everyone is having a great day!

Patrick

-- 
Patrick Durusau
Patrick@Durusau.net
Chair, V1 - Text Processing: Office and Publishing Systems Interface
Co-Editor, ISO 13250, Topic Maps -- Reference Model
Member, Text Encoding Initiative Board of Directors, 2003-2005

Topic Maps: Human, not artificial, intelligence at work!