By now, lawyers are well aware that the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure require the production of electronically stored information. However, many questions still exist and continue to emerge regarding various aspects of ESI, especially the discoverability of metadata. Despite amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, the Sedona Guidelines and court decisions on this subject, many practitioners are still scratching their heads, wondering how to best advise their clients regarding metadata.

What is metadata? Some lawyers still don’t know. Metadata is commonly defined as “information about a particular data set which describes how, when and by whom it was collected, created, accessed and/or modified and how it is formatted.” Williams v. Sprint/United Management Co., 230 F.R.D. 640, 646 (D. Kan. 2005) (quotations omitted). Simply stated, metadata provides technical, “behind the scenes” information about an electronic file, and some electronic files contain thousands of pieces of this information. For example, an e-mail file has more than 1,200 metadata properties, including sent and receipt dates, reply, forward and copy information, and sender address book information. Similarly, Internet documents contain many hidden “meta-tags” that allow searching to locate responsive Web sites and “cookies” (text files) that are often unknown to the user but can track usage and transmit information back to the cookies originator. See “The Sedona Principles: Second Edition, Best Practices Recommendations & Principles for Addressing Electronic Document Production” (June 2007), at 3-4.

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