PDF for Lawyers

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.