Legal Research

… And While We’re On The Subject Of Literacy

… Let’s also discuss tech literacy.

Frank Hayes at Computerworld has posted an article about how lawyers for Barclays Capital messed up (for lack of a better term) a spreadsheet of assets belonging to failed investment bank Lehman Brothers.  (Read the article for details about how it happened.  Something about automatically hidden rows reappearing when some columns were cut from the spreadsheet.)  Anyway, nobody took the time to doublecheck the PDF that was generated from the spreadsheet, so Barclays wound up including unwanted assets in the list of items it intends to purchase from Lehman.  They’ve filed a motion for relief concerning “certain contracts erroneously posted with the ‘closing date contracts’” in U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York.

This is yet another example of how metadata — and I’m using the term here to refer to any data that is hidden in an electronic document — can really bite you in the you-know-what.

I think that most attorneys know, with differing levels of detail based on their tech literacy, that MS Word is notorious for containing hidden data.  That’s why their firms use metadata scrubbers.  But a whole lot less of ‘em are competent about dealing with other types of metadata, such as displaying hidden rows in Excel or properly redacting data in Adobe Acrobat PDFs.  This is an important topic for an attorney — ethics in the electronic age — and I teach a class on it.

Hayes concludes by giving us 3 rules to live by:

• Keep it simple.
• Don’t make assumptions.
• And never, ever trust tech more than you really have to.

I’d like to give you another:

• Data wants to leak.  Don’t help it out by using program features you don’t fully understand.

Full post as published by Jenkins Webblits on October 22, 2008 (boomark / email).