As a real estate lawyer working in Paradise Valley and Scottsdale for over 20 years, I have seen scores of families ship-wrecked by money. ‘Around the world, inherited wealth is hard to preserve, says an article from Intelligent Life, a quarterly published by one of my favorite journals  The Economist:

Families that preserve their wealth over the generations are rare. The fact that the first generation makes it, the second husbands it and the third blows it is so widespread that it reflects reality. Some say, “clogs to clogs in three generations”—a northern English saying—has its equivalent in many other languages: Erwerben, Vererben, Verderben (earn it, bequeath it, burn it) in Germany; “from the stables to the stars and back in three generations” in Italy; and my favorite “from sandals to sandals in three generations” in China. 

I once had a Trust fund client show up to Court in a $2,500.00 double breasted Italian blazer with white pressed Armani pants and I am not kidding- sandals. I could hear his grandfather roll over in his grave. 

We have significant real world experience at the real estate and commercial law at the Firm of William A. Miller in Scottsdale, Arizona. We also have been helping families set up Estate plans to minimize the above sandals problem for the last 15 years. Give us a call at 480-948-3095 to see if we can help. If nothing else, make your kids work. That will solve 95% of the sandal problem.

What should a litigant do when confronted with disclosure of confidential metadata? Conversely, what should you do if you learn that confidential metadata has been disclosed? Some recent case law may offer insight:

In People v. Gomez, 134 Cal. App. 3d 874, 879 (1982), the court, dealing with privileged material in general, held that failure to take reasonable precautions to maintain the confidentiality of information may be deemed consent to its disclosure.

Amersham Biosciences Corp. v. Perkinelmer, Inc., 2007 WL 329290 (D.N.J. 2007), may be particularly instructive in determining the meaning of “reasonable precautions” when dealing with confidential metadata, as it is the only case dealing with this particular topic. The New Jersey district court was asked to decide whether reasonable precautions were taken in the inadvertent disclosure of some 500-plus privileged Lotus Notes e-mail documents that were deleted within subfolders when converted to CD, but remained embedded in the larger folder when converted to single image files.

The court held that if the confidential nature of the documents was apparent on the face of the documents after their conversion from their native format to single image files, then the final spot check conducted by the disclosing party may not have been reasonable. Consequently, it would appear that “reasonable precautions” means that counsel should probably review each electronically-stored document at every stage of the conversion process. More on this issue can be found at www.law.com.

At the law firm of William A. Miller, we have experience in handling these electronic discovery issues. Give us a call at 480.948.3095 to learn more.