This is day job stuff, but it’s good advice. If you are trading documents between a couple parties, it pays to check the document properties. This can be especially true if one of those parties is unnamed.
Today, I was looking through a contract from an agency that would not disclose their partner prior to the agreement’s execution. Now, I’d never sign anything like this anyway. You have to be super careful when it comes to warrants, reps and indemnities especially if you have a third party who is not party to your agreement. I’m not a lawyer, but my lawyer is and I wouldn’t even put something like this in front of her.
Here’s the fun part. If you choose File -> Properties in say, Word or Excel, a document summary dialog box pops up. In this case the original author (the undisclosed third party) was actually the author of the agreement. Check it out:
Normally, that wouldn’t be all that important, but I was already in the middle of direct negotiations with that previously unknown party. The point is, while I would have had to puke on the agreement in its current form, I saved myself a ton of time by walking away by using the old, “the economics aren’t right” excuse. On the other hand, if I hadn’t been working with them directly, this would have enabled me to circumvent the agency.
This is really amatuer stuff. There’s a ton of meta data attached to all kinds of files. It pays to know where to look if you’re curious or if you want to erase it before sharing files/documents.
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