Can metadata be misleading?
Metadata can be the difference between winning or losing a modern case. That’s why it’s vital to spot metadata anomalies. However, this can be highly complicated. Any inconsistency in metadata could lead to accusations of data tampering and would put your case in a challenging position.
Organisations can turn to automation to thoroughly examine their data quickly. In some enterprise environments, advanced tools can comb through the data and point teams towards what needs to be fixed. Automated tools highlight which metadata is not consistent across the databases. With consistent filing, discrepancies are less common and metadata retains its validity.
It’s the organisation's responsibility to maintain this. If a company is being sued or discovery has already begun, it’ll be too late for them to fix their metadata.
It’s important to note that metadata can be wrong – but not always in a malicious way. For example, if a colleague were to make a copy of a document, the metadata would show a created date of when the copy was made, and not that of the original document.
If documents like this were to be brought into eDiscovery, they would appear as duplicates, as most platforms don’t measure file system metadata when running de-duplication algorithms. They do tend to store information from any duplicate documents found, however. Of course, metadata can also be deliberately spoliated.
