Cautionary Tale of Leaving the “Track Changes” Unaccepted. Or, I Never Metadata I Didn’t Like

Posted by Alan Childress

From the law-tech website The Connected Lawyer comes an abject lesson in leaving metadata or similar residual thoughts intact when sending a document to a client, opposing counsel, or partner down the hall. (Our posts here, here, and here — and Legal Ethics Forum here and here — on the inconsistent ethics rules in varying jurisdictions over mining metadata and inadvertent disclosure.)   In this particular case, it was a business plan of a start-up sent out without accepting Word’s “Track Changes” (way more stupid than forgetting to scrub true metadata), leaving splayed some marginal comments for readers to enjoy, like:

• “When you talk through this point on your slides, make Chanukah jokes, he is Jewish and will get them.”
• “I’d delete this section since we don’t have these features on the roadmap and haven’t figured out how to code this unless you believe the investors won’t catch this.”
• “VCs are typically stupid when it comes to this section so be prepared for a dumb question blizzard.”

The Connected Lawyer links and credits this post,which in turn links lots of other cautionary tales and examples. (Originally the above problem was noticed by this VC/venture capitalist.) We have some other classic horror stories in our own prior post on the subject.  Here is a resource of bad examples, good examples, and how to remove Track Changes in MSWord.