NY: Mining for metadata is unethical
Robert J. Ambrogi reports on Legal Blog Watch:
Mining for metadata in documents received from opposing counsel is unethical, says a new ethics opinion from the New York County Lawyers’ Association. “A lawyer who receives from an adversary electronic documents that appear to contain inadvertently produced metadata is ethically obligated to avoid searching the metadata in those documents,” the opinion concludes. The opinion is notable for its disagreement with a 2006 American Bar Association Ethics Committee opinion that reached the opposite conclusion, permitting review of metadata in documents opposing counsel sends electronically . . .