Texas Court: Don’t Mess With Metadata

A federal court in Dallas adopted the recommendation of a magistrate judge and issued an adverse inference order and imposed $27,500 in sanctions against an attorney who “created a new profile” on a computer, then copied data on to it and altered the data. The point, according to an independent expert, apparently was “to make it look like that was his computer that he used all the time” and thereby avoid producing the computer he in fact had been using during the period relevant to the lawsuit.