Requesting party permitted to see only metadata and not substance of documents

June 15th, 2009 | By Evan Brown

Kravetz v. Paul Revere Life Insurance Co., 2009 WL 1639736 (D.Ariz. June 11, 2009)

Plaintiff sought disability benefits from defendant insurance companies, but the insurance companies denied the claim. So plaintiff sued. The insurance companies sought discovery of the hard drives and storage media plaintiff had used for business purposes.

After plaintiff objected to this discovery, defendants moved to compel. The court granted the motion, but added an unusual twist — it allowed the defendants to see the metadata from documents the plaintiff had worked on but prohibited review of the documents themselves.

The court found that the insurance companies “need not and may not review the substance of documents on plaintiffs’ hard drives and media devices.” Accordingly, the order permitted a third party consultant “only [to] extract metadata and other necessary electronic information regarding the amount of time spent on documents.”

While metadata may often be irrelevant to the claims or defenses in a matter, the court in this case recognized a limited purpose for which it may properly be discovered. The insurance company sought the information merely to ascertain how much time the plaintiff spent working on the computer. The actual content of the documents was apparently unrelated to the disability claims.

The plaintiff had challenged the metadata’s ability to show the number of hours he worked on the computer. But siding with the notion of broad discovery, the court advised that the plaintiff would be free to challenge the weight the information should be given at trial.

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