The Times Online reports the latest in the growing list of documents that have been released with previous edits and other information still contained in the documents and readily accessible.

In this case, the UN released a report on the murder of Rafik Hariri, the former Lebanese Prime Minister, only to have, to put it mildly, embarrassing edits revealed because they were still contained in the released document.

As the article says:

THE United Nations withheld some of the most damaging allegations against Syria in its report on the murder of Rafik Hariri, the former Lebanese Prime Minister, it emerged yesterday.

The names of the brother of Bashar al-Assad, President of Syria, and other members of his inner circle, were dropped from the report that was sent to the Security Council.

The confidential changes were revealed by an extraordinary computer gaffe because an electronic version distributed by UN officials on Thursday night allowed recipients to track editing changes.

Extraordinary computer gaffe? These "gaffes" have become all too commonplace.

And too many lawyers remain unaware of the issue.

As an example, a lawyer sent me an email today noting this article and saying, "is my understanding correct that the two ways of preventing prior versions from being disseminated in a Microsoft Word document are by either changing the format to pdf or rtf, or by clicking 'accept changes' in Word?"

I thought I'd share my answer to that question:

Arrrghhh!!! Your second assumption is probably the CAUSE of the revisions being able to be revealed! It's absolutely not the solution.

The first method will generally work, but you can mess up and reveal revisions and other information (which I'll refer to as "metadata") even when using RTFs and PDFs. If you want to be really sure, you'll want to use a metadata cleaner and then save the document as a PDF. However, even then you need to become acquainted with the various issues out there and the actual dangers in documents.

Be aware that you can reintroduce that hidden info in a variety of ways after you think that you have "cleaned" it. By the way, don't make the assumption that the doc was in MS Word, even though the odds are that was the program used here. You can pull that prior version info out of other programs as well, including the beloved tool of many lawyers, WordPerfect. In addition, be careful about the assumptions you make about different versions of different programs. Don't make assumptions - make it your business to learn about the issues and the solutions.

This is important stuff, often with embarrassing and far-reaching results. There's no excuse for lawyers (and others) not to be familiar with the basic issues of metadata and to be knowledgeable about both the problems and the solutions. That is, unless they want to have their documents or their clients' documents appear in similar stories in the newspaper. Too many lawyers are operating in the dark on this one. Lawyers routinely send me documents that have metadata that is either easily visible or can readily be surfaced with little or no effort.

I posted a short primer on metadata and the related issues on my blog at http://www.denniskennedy.com/archives/2005_10.html#a000891. Use it as a starting point and then set aside a little time to get yourself up to speed on these issues. Making assumptions in this area is especially dangerous.

How many times do you (and lawyers in general) need to hear the alarm go off on these issues before you stop hitting the snooze button and going back to sleep?