You’re at work revising a proposal for a public bid or an internal memorandum to your supervisor where you make references to people you work with, it gets revised and edited by a manager before it is sent out and publicized. Simple, you do this regularly.

You create a document and send it out.

This may not be as simple as you thought. You need to recognize what technology is doing to communication. The expression on Joseph P. Donahue Jr.’s face, a business law attorney of of 50 years, was more powerful than words when the discussion of Meta Data came up in a recent firm gathering. A lawyer trained prior to the advent of the generally accepted Rules of Discovery were adopted in the 1960’s, Attorney Donahue never quite understood the overflow of documents produced and was always a bit suspicious of aggressive and unnecessary litigation issues. The concept of meta data sealed it for him.

That document you have created is more than what appears on the screen and it could haunt you if your company is ever subject to litigation or an audit.

Even tech savvy lawyers/businesses of this generation will now cringe at the prospect that electronic documents may very well contain “invisible confidential information.” See David Hricik and Robert Jueneman, the Transmission and Receipt of Invisible Confidential Information (2003) at http://www.hricik.com/eethics/Metadata1103.doc

Simply stated -- software maps changes to a document and this information, though not visible as you see any document on a screen, can be accessed and seen. This means that show revisions that you may not want to share. For example, consider an offer letter drafted by you containing a price to purchase a good service or real estate. You circulate and discuss the offer with colleagues or a family member as you consider your next move in a negotiation. In that process, the number in the offer changes and comments are made.

This data, the comments the changes are saved and could be seen with little effort. The data not visible – meta data-- can in fact still be mapped in the document and anyone getting a copy of such an offer could very well look behind the text and expose the changes which could be detrimental to a negotiation. This meta data includes information about who generated the document, when it was revised, and the additional or changed information in the document. More dramatically it could contain comments made in an edited document and the revisions themselves leaving the changes and the time spent editing the document.

What steps can you take to protect yourself? We’ll keep you updated on this potential minefield on your computer.