The inclination of federal courts to require metadata be included with electronic documents obtained through e-discovery seems to be seeping down to the state courts. In a case decided by the Arizona Supreme Court last fall, justices flipped two lower court rulings and found in favor of a defendant seeking some electronic files and their metadata from the city of Phoenix.
The litigation, Lake v. Phoenix, involved a police officer alleging employment discrimination by the city of Phoenix. His attorneys requested the city supply copies of Lake's supervisor's notes. They received paper copies of the documents. Suspicious that the evidence may have been doctored, the attorneys demanded the electronic files on which the documents were based and the metadata for those files. The city refused the request, and two courts agreed with the municipality before the case landed in the lap of the state's highest court.
"The metadata in an electronic document is part of the underlying document; it does not stand on its own," the justices wrote. "When a public officer uses a computer to make a public record, the metadata forms part of the document as much as the words on the page."
"Arizona’s public records law requires that the requestor be allowed to review a copy of the “real record," they observed. ”It would be illogical, and contrary to the policy of openness underlying the public records laws, to conclude that public entities can withhold information embedded in an electronic document, such as the date of creation, while they would be required to produce the same information if it were written manually on a paper public record."
So the lesson to be learned here is this: when it comes to eDiscovery all things matter, even the data about the data.
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