METADATA AND FULL TEXT EXTRACTION
There is a lot of buzz in the legal community about the practical and ethical implications of metadata. However, the majority of people do not understand what metadata is, how it can be helpful, or the precautions that should be made when producing electronic documents. Lighthouse Document Technologies can help clients understand the issues surrounding metadata. Moreover, we can help you devise an approach for handling metadata both offensively and defensively.
Metadata, commonly described as "data about data,” is "information about a particular data set which describes how, when and by whom it was collected, created, accessed, or modified and how it is formatted. (See The Sedona Conference Glossary for E-Discovery And Digital Information Management)
There are literally hundreds of metadata fields in the different types of electronic files; however, the reality is that only a small number of those fields are actually helpful for electronic discovery purposes.
Depending on your case, some metadata fields such as date of last access or modification, blind carbon copy recipients, or permissions as to who could read or edit a particular document may be important to develop a compelling argument and establish a timeline for critical events.
However in practice, it is much more common to extract metadata as a method to pull basic characteristics, i.e. date, author, subject, etc., from a document so it can be loaded to a review application. In essence, extracting metadata from native files and loading them to a review application is an alternative to manual subjective coding. It allows users to quickly search, sort, and review documents without the additional cost of coding.
To ensure the most useful and reliable searching capability, metadata extraction is most effective when done in conjunction with full-text extraction. Full text extraction is the process of pulling the body of an electronic document so the information can be indexed and searched in a case management application.
After devising an individualized approach for processing your electronically stored data, Lighthouse Document Technologies will take your data from almost any electronic source, extract the text and metadata, and prepare the files for output to a variety of case management applications or, if you prefer, in native format. We take special care to preserve the integrity of your data throughout the entire process.
