Federal Rules of Civil Procedure New Rule 34(b)(ii)

To Metadata or Not to Metadata?

The new federal rules do not specifically address an important aspect of the e-discovery battlefield, though: what to do about "metadata," the "data about data" that is part of every electronically stored document or file that, typically, went unnoticed in the age when producing hard copy documents was the norm. So when must metadata be produced? Recent case law illustrates that the new rules do not address the question directly.

I would be interested in hearing from techies in the civil service and the contracting community as to what they think about this.

I would suggest to my fellow flacks that records management and document management are very much a PR issue.