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See

http://www.nysba.org/Content/Navigat...pinion_782.htm

and pass this along to your law firm IT staff and your malpractice loss prevention partner.

QUOTE snip

New York State Bar Assoc. Committee on Pro. Ethics

Opinion 782 — 12/8/04 (1-04)

New York State Bar Association Committee on Professional Ethics

Topic: E-mailing documents that may contain hidden data
reflecting client confidences and secrets.

Digest: Lawyers must exercise reasonable care to prevent the disclosure of confidences and secrets contained in metadata in documents they transmit electronically to opposing counsel or other third parties.

Code: DR 1-102(A)(5), 4-101(B), (C), (D); EC 4-5.

QUESTION

DR 4-101(B) states that a lawyer shall not
knowingly reveal a confidence or secret of a client. Does
a lawyer who transmits documents that contain metadata
reflecting client confidences or secrets violate DR 4-101(B)?

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This is a serious-ass problem with MSWord. You can't actually delete or clean out the metadata, either, so far as we've been able to figure out (there are scrubber programs that claim to do it, but they apparently don't actually work).

It's not just information about the doc you are sending, either - if it was copied (or sections of it were copied) from another doc, it will probably contain the meta-data of the other doc as well. So you also need to worry about Word docs you send to your own clients, because you're potentially divulging confidential information of the other clients from whose docs you copied text.

Seriously, we should all go back to WordPerfect 5.1.

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Or convert to a pdf.

But if you like not having to use a mouse, WP 5.1 is always there. As is the typewriter.

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PDFs and hardcopies suck, because opposing counsel sends me back crappy hand markups rather than nice redlines I can actually read. And PDFs tend to fuck up your mail box when you're trading drafts of 75 page documents with 25 person working groups 3x per week. I'd happily go back to 5.1 if anybody else could open it.

BR(my systems generally guys consider me comic relief, but tend to agree with me about lamenting the demise of WP 5.1)C

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Why does no one else insert notes in .pdf documents? Why does no one else see the notes I insert in .pdf documents?

True. Oh the humanity!

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Do you need Acrobat, and not just Reader? If so, I've got about 250 reasons why most lawyers don't use it.

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Interesting. As it happens, my firm recently rolled out a program that stops you as you send out email and prompts you to "analyze" and "cleanse" all attachments of all metadata. The explanation was the risk of (for example) inadvertently disclosing data about Client A when you use Client A's doc as a base for drafting something for Client B, instead of casting it in purely ethical terms, but still.

Anyone know anything about these Greedy Associates?

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Oh you are so so so right about ALL of this. First, getting back to WordPerfect. It was so nice to use the "reveal format" function so you could see what bullshit was screwing things up and delete it quickly. Second, Microsoft Word likes to "automatic format" and it screws everything up and I can't turn it off. Third, with WP everything was done without a mouse by Code and it was awesome typing away without ever looking up or moving from the keyboard as long as you were handy with those codes.

And those PDF files? Oh how they screw up my mailbox. I got sent a billion PDFs today and you frantically are transferring them to your hard drive (while keeping the email so you have a record of who sent it and when and why) so you can fricking use your email again. Nothing worse than getting a bunch of PDFs and you can't use your inbox b/c you have to clean out this bullshit. I cringe everytime I get the message that my mailbox is too full to send the message that NEEDS TO BE SENT NOW BY ME.

On another note, on my home computer I am seriously hurting with constant popups, some of which require me to delete it, and then I get a "follow up popop" asking me if I'm sure I wanted to delete that (a Reg cleaner product). Literally, this double whammy pop up intrustion happens every time I go to a new page on the internet. For someone who uses the Internet heavily for research it is ghastly. I got over 75 popops from this reg cleaner dudes. I run "spyhunter" constantly and it always says I'm eliminating 35 or so "parasites" but this crap happens all day. I'm using a popop blocker (by panicware) as well as the function on my Internet explorer under "tools; block pop up ads" but still no avail. How can I prevent these intrusions, some of which come up when I'm working on a Word document?

Thanks.

VM

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If you have stuff backed up, reformat your hard drive (reinstall windows from the original disks) and then use (a) install virus/privacy/firewall immediately, before going to any websites AT ALL, or opening any mail, or doing anything; (b) update windows from the windows website, using explorer (c) instafirefox/mozilla and use it whenever you can for websites instead of crap explorer. You can set it to block popups and it actually works. It also gives you (at the top of the screen) a message if it blocked a popup and you can click to see what got blocked -- kinda handy. search "firefox" on the computers board for details.

If you use McAfee virus/firewall/privacy service, you can set it to ask you before it accepts any cookies. However, you have to load and update McAfee using Explorer, which kinda sucks, but I trust their site not to give me spyware or anything. I will accept cookies from the actual website I want, but I don't accept them from anything else. I would think Norton would have something similar.

You can try just switching to firefox/mozilla and then running your spyware and virus check and stuff several times to try to get rid of everything, but this was stunningly unsuccessful for me. I don't think the spyware removers are fully effective and I think they can't, no matter how hard they try, keep up with all the spyware stuff.

And, of course, never ever ever ever download anything off the web unless you really really trust it. Even things that seem "fun" and "cool" and should be "harmless" but are free.

(Reinstalled windows and did all the stuff above; had a great, fast running, popup free computer for like a month, then hard drive went kaput and got a new one and had to install windows etc. etc. and didn't do all the stuff above in the right order because I am a DUMB ASS and had to go thru whole process again. Painful. But, happy computer now.)


ETA this is kind of extreme advice, but it sounds like you are having big problems.

It's Penske's beta board for testing his inisidiously insipid socks. It used to be known as the Prodigy.Net greedyboard until the bubble burst.

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1. Go into the autocorrect menu and turn off autoformat. There are several different types of autoformatting (lists, italics, 2 caps, etc.) leave on only those you want.

2. Word has keystrokes as well for formatting--you can customize what keys turn on/off italics, bold, undl., etc.

3. Use any browser other than IE. Netscape, Firefox, your own programming all are better, have pop-up blockers that work, and avoid most spyware. don't use IE. Just don't. seriously. that will cure 75% of your problems.

4. Learn to use the archive feature in outlook--no more problems with inbox space limitations. If all you're doing is archiving for records purposes, it will be perfect.

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Burger and LTL -- you are the best. You have improved the quality of my life. Whew hew! Oh, and things got much crazier with the computer (a box that kept insisting I "switch" to something or "retry" that wouldn't go away) but I got some relief from using System Restore to go back to a prior setting date. The thing that made it screwy was downloading from Symantec a download that purported to remove the annoying "Websearch toolbar" which kept trying to download itself.

On a more general note, I'm confused as to why the people who buy popups think it will work to get people to buy their stuff. Do people really buy this stuff from popops? Most just try to block the stuff.

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I assume it's a bit like spam (although they do have to pay something)--they figure if only a small percent are intrigued, that's enough to return value. Also, it probably creates name recognition. Heard of X10?

Could you be one of the stolen?