Dowling, Aaron & Keeler migrate from a desktop metadata removal application onto the 3BClean server-based platform

Dowling, Aaron & Keeler is a full-service law firm based in central California. The firm recognised the need to remove metadata from documents it emails externally, primarily to protect client confidentiality. In particular, if documents are to be re-used as a template for different clients, it’s important to clean metadata and remove any document properties or author names that may not be accurate.

Previously, the firm was using a metadata cleaning product from a leading supplier, however, this presented problems, mostly because it was desktop-based and ran on each individual user’s machine. “Maintaining the configurations for each of our 130 users was difficult,” said Brian D. Liggett, Network Administrator. “There were also performance issues, where the user would hit send and then see a performance degradation as their PC had to process the metadata cleaning.”

The original solution also had usability issues, for instance, when users sent an email, the window that was supposed to ‘pop-up’ on their PC screen would instead ‘pop-under’, and be hidden by other open windows. This meant that the user did not see the window from the metadata cleaning solution which requested their response, and would think their PC had crashed, with the inevitable time wasting this involved to get the issue resolved.

Server-based solution chosen To overcome these problems, the firm researched the market to find a server-based solution. They trialed and then selected 3BClean from UK firm 3BView “We did look at other products, but very rapidly focussed in on 3BClean because it is a more developed server-based product,” commented Liggett.

The firm installed 3BClean for its 130 users in December 2007, and has been using it successfully ever since. The users are split across the firm’s two offices, in Fresno and Bakersfield, and 3BClean processes all emails sent externally. The two offices are connected with a T1 line, and effectively treated as part of one internal site.

The software is installed on one server that sites between the company’s firewall and email server. Liggett explains, “We try and rotate out our PCs on a three year cycle, with a third of the machines being retired every year, so we just installed 3BClean on a three-year-old PC we were going to take out of service. It’s a Pentium 4 1.8GHz box with 2G memory and a 40GB IDE hard drive – we didn’t need to go buy a new server for 3BClean – and this works fine for our 130 users.”

By default, 3BClean is configured to remove metadata from all of the firm’s outbound email, from files including Word, Excel, RTF and PDF documents. If there is an exception where an attorney needs to send out a document with tracked changes, they use simple tags in the subject line of the email to alter the behaviour of 3BClean. For example, this can allow the email to be sent out with the metadata still in any attachments, or with attachments converted to a secure PDF.

Another attractive feature of the system for Liggett is that it provides a good process to handle any emails it cannot remove the metadata from: “Occasionally we’ll get a notification saying 3BClean tried to process an email but couldn’t, and we then sort it out and forward it back to the sender – for example, this happens with a password-protected document that the server can’t open. A nice thing is that if 3BClean can’t process an email based on the configuration we’ve set up, it bounces back the email – so it fails to safety without any risk of sending out the email incorrectly.”

Responsive Support

According to Liggett, the installation and use of 3BClean has been straightforward: “I’m very happy with the pre-sales support and after-sales support from 3BView, and their US team has been fantastic. When we’ve had to go back to the UK for detailed support we’ve always had a prompt answer that solved things straight away, and we’ve never had any issues that lasted more than 24 hours. 3BView have been very responsive”

For the future, Liggett is considering the implications of e-discovery to email archiving and metadata removal, but comments: “Right now, we’re very happy. The users forget about 3BClean, and it just happens in the background.”

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