Daniel Barr, a partner in Perkins Coie Brown & Bain's Phoenix office, was sitting in a dentist chair during an appointment last year when he read an e-mail update on his BlackBerry about an obscure public records case. The issue: Should metadata, the information that reveals the history of a document, be considered a public record like most other government documents?
A state appeals court in Arizona said no earlier this year in denying a police officer access to performance reviews written by his superiors, but the state Supreme Court reversed the decision Thursday in what is believed to be the first metadata ruling from a state's highest court, the Associated Press reports. The officer at the center of the case suspected his superiors had backdated the negative reviews so it would appear that they were written before his demotion. Such data is not included in the final performance review. To find out who accessed the document when, the officer needed to see the metadata.
Barr, who has extensive experience in media law, read about the ruling on his BlackBerry and knew immediately the case had importance far beyond the individual officer, and that the state Supreme Court should hear it. He called several of his regular media clients only to find few interested in pursuing the case as an amicus party; some had never heard of metadata, and some simply didn't have the money to pay legal fees, he says.
Eventually, three press organizations signed on as amicus parties under Barr's representation: The First Amendment Coalition of Arizona, the Society of Professional Journalists and the Arizona Newspapers Association. Three more retained Steptoe & Johnson partner David Bodney to file their own amicus brief.
The state Supreme Court accepted the case, much to the surprise of Caroline Pilch of Yen Pilch Komadina & Fleming, the employment attorney who had been representing the officer all along. "We never envisioned this case going all the way to the Supreme Court," Pilch says. "It started out as a narrow little case."
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Source: law.com
By: Zach Lowe
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