PDF for Lawyers

Removing PDF metadata & document markups using Acrobat

All digital documents contain metadata, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. Metadata is just hidden information about a document, usually not very interesting information. But hidden information is hard to evaluate because, well...it's hidden. Some of that hidden information could be embarrassing and some could be downright damaging. PDFs are digital documents, and hence they contain metadata. Fortunately, Adobe Acrobat gives us a way to quickly find, and delete if we choose, that hidden data. The trick is to know where to look. Unfortunately, if you look under all of the menus in Acrobat you won't find a choice labelled 'Metadata.' The command you're looking for is called "Examine Document" which is under the DOCUMENTS menu choice. See the screenshot below:

Once you select this option your PDF will open a panel on the left hand side and start to run an analysis of the document, as shown by the red arrow marked #1 below. The #2 red arrow points to the types of information that have been found. You'll note that this document contains "metadata" and "bookmarks," which would be considered a type of "markup" in Acrobat. Comments and highlighting are also considered forms of "markup."

So the next question is, obviously: how do you remove the metadata and other markups? And the answer it found next to the red #3 arrow in the screenshot below. You just click on the button that is labeled "Remove."

But before we do that let's go back and look at the left panel again because you'll note that we have choices as to what we remove. That is, it's not an all-or-nothing deal. We can cherry pick what we want to have taken out. After all, we might want to leave the bookmarks in the document. So, these are the choices:

If we're happy with the choices that are selected (in this case all) then we click that "Remove" button and Acrobat will purge all of that information. But, the changes aren't locked in yet. If you look in the lower left hand area you'll see this important notification:

Once you save the document (or save it as a new document, if you prefer) then the changes will be locked in. So that's how you get rid of metadata, and comments and bookmarks. Frankly, I think it would have been better if Adobe had put these tools in the same area where you examine the document properties (which we talked about in the last two posts). It seems to me that once you shouldn't have to go to two different places to "examine the document." In Acrobat X the process is a little easier to find because the command is labelled "Remove Hidden Information" as the screenshot below depicts:

I hope that helps folks understand how to use this important tool in Acrobat. It's features like this that make me cringe when I hear lawyers recommending some less expensive alternative to Acrobat. Yes, I realize that Acrobat is a costly tool. But it's also a very powerful one, and versatile as well. Lawyers who want to have the options to sanitize documents and do all sorts of other important tasks should spend less time worrying about saving a few dollars and more time learning how to take advantage of all the useful features in Acrobat. What's that saying about "Penny wise and pound foolish"? Final note: The ability to remove metadata is part of Acrobat versions 8 and above.

Examining a PDF's Document Security

In the previous post we discussed how to examine a PDF’s document properties, focusing on the “Description” tab. Now, we’re going to focus on the tab marked “Security.”

You’ll see three things in the graphic below that are worth noting: (1) the Security Tab is highlighted, because that’s the tab we’re focused on, (2) the “Security Method” is set to “No Security,” and (3) the summary of restrictions for this document lists all of the things that are still allowed.

 

Obviously, any of these things that are currently allowed in this document can be disallowed. That is, you can restrict a PDF so that someone can’t print, or change the document, or assemble it into another document etc. To do this you just go the area marked 2 (in the graphic above) and change the selection from “No Security” to “Password Security” at which point you will see the following dialogue box:

  

When you start imposing security on a document you wind up with a lot of choices, which I’m not going to get into right now. The main thing I wanted to show you is how to find out what kind of security has been imposed on a PDF that you are using. Whenever you have problems with a PDF the first thing you should do is examine the Document Properties, and often you will find that some sort of security has been put on it.

 

Examining a PDF's "Document Properties"

All PDFs have “Document’s Properties,” which you can examine to learn more about the document. You can examine PDF properties with Acrobat, and with Adobe Reader (the free program for viewing PDFs). Although many people might not ever need to examine a PDF’s properties, the more you work with PDFs the greater the likelihood that doing so will be useful. So how do you view a PDF’s properties?

Simply select the following menu choices: FILE > PROPERTIES. Incidentally, the keyboard shortcut is worth remembering, and it’s CONTROL + D on a Windows computer (or COMMAND + D on a Mac).  It’s an easy shortcut to remember: “D” is for document, right?

Below is an example of what the Properties dialogue box looks like for one of my example PDFs, a document I call “The Long Boring Contract.”

I’ve selected the “Description” tab and then put red boxes to focus on information about (1) some metadata about the title of the document and the author (in this case: Ernest Svenson), and (2) the file size of the document (i.e. 61.05 KB). If you care about the file sizes of your PDFs, and increasingly you will care, then to learn how to access this window pane quickly. The shortcut is D + Command (on Mac) or D + Control (on PC).

 

Securing PDFs - free webinar this Thursday

If you are interested in learning how to secure your PDFs, you should seriously consider signing up for this one hour webinar put on by Adobe.  It's called "Securing Legal Documents & Information" and its free if you are registered with Adobe.  Expert Acrobat instructors Rick Borstein and Bryant Bell and will cover common questions such as these:

• How do I keep the recipient from copying text or printing a PDF?
• How can I password protect a PDF?
• How do I ensure that only the intended recipient can open a PDF?
• How do I revoke a PDF, even after it has been renamed, copied to a thumbdrive or sent outside my firewall?
• How can I find out if a PDF is genuine and hasn't been tampered with?
• How do I ensure that the PDF I need to send does not contain dangerous metadata?

The webinar is this coming Thursday from noon to 1 pm CST.  To sign up or find out more about the program, click here.

Examining metadata is an ethics violation?

My co-author, Dave Fishel, wrote recently about the Florida Bar Ass'n questioning if the examination of metadata sent by opposing counsel could be considered an ethics violation.  In this 2004 article (PDF) about the perils of metadata, Colorado attorney Brian Zall reports (pg 56) that a recipient attorney may have some ethical obligations, specifically the duty to report the inadvertent disclosure has occurred.  Colorado has not specifically raised the question in terms of metadata, but generally in terms of inadvertent disclosures of any kind (e.g. of privileged information).

While there are many attorneys now who are aware of metadata, there are still many who have no idea what metadata is.  Perhaps there should be a rule requiring the recipient of a file with damaging metadata to disclose the fact of its existence.  Devious attorneys would ignore the rule, but it would at least signal that the bar doesn't condone the high-tech gamesmanship that will sometimes take place.

NSA issues guidelines on redacting metadata

UPI story: "The National Security Agency has issued technical guidance for U.S. officials on redacting or editing sensitive documents for release following a series of embarrassing incidents in which so-called metadata stored in electronic formats like Microsoft Word or Adobe PDF files has been accidentally exposed."

The story talks about a kind of metadata that gets passed from Word to PDF called "undo stack," which is a list of every editing change made in the file, saved by the program so that they can be reversed using the "undo" function.  The NSA's 14 page guide, entitled Redacting with Confidence: How to Safely Publish Sanitized Reports Converted from Word to PDF, is available in PDF (naturally).

Wordperfect's new metadata scrubbing feature

Here's another article on the new version of WordPerfect (X3) and its metadata-fighting feature.  The article quotes Jim Calloway, who runs the Law Practice Tips Blog.  If you ever have a chance to hear Jim speak about technology take it.