DC Bar Releases Ethics Opinion on Metadata Mining
This month, the Legal Ethics Committee of the District of Columbia Bar issued Ethics Opinion 341 on the review and use of metadata in electronic records. Attempting to create a compromise position on the issue of metadata mining, the committee found that a lawyer receiving electronic records from an adversary is prohibited from reviewing the records’ metadata only when he has actual knowledge that the metadata was inadvertently sent. In such cases, the receiving lawyer should not review the metadata before consulting with the sending lawyer to determine whether the metadata includes work product of the sending lawyer or confidences or secrets of that lawyer’s client. The full text of the ethics opinion can be found here.