SPV-LS, LLC v. Transamerica Life Insurance Co.

What happened

In the course of federal litigation, a key retainer agreement was produced as evidence. Forensic metadata analysis of the document, performed on the file's own stored properties, showed it had been created approximately one year after the date it purported to bear, and critically, only two days before it was submitted to the court. The timing was strong evidence that the document had been fabricated specifically for the litigation rather than created at the time of the underlying event it was meant to evidence. The attorney who produced the document faced sanctions under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26(g) for submitting a document that metadata showed was likely fabricated. This case is a direct demonstration of why self-produced centralised document evidence cannot establish when a file was actually created: any Word document or PDF carries creation and modification timestamps from the user's own system, which can be set to any date by anyone with access to that system.