Metadata in NDAs and Contract PDFs
A contract or NDA goes through a lot of hands before it's signed — drafted by one firm, marked up by another, redlined internally, exported and re-exported a dozen times. Every one of those steps can leave a trace in the PDF's metadata, long after the visible text has been tidied up for the final version.
What can be sitting in a "clean" contract PDF
- Author and Producer fields — often the name of a paralegal, associate, or whoever's copy of Word or Acrobat generated the file, plus the software that made it.
- Internal file paths — some export tools embed the original save path, which can reveal a matter number, a client codename, or a firm's internal folder structure.
- Creation and modification timestamps — useful for reconstructing a negotiation timeline you didn't intend to share.
- Leftover tracked changes or comments — if the PDF was exported from a Word document, redlines and reviewer comments can survive the conversion in ways that aren't obvious from the printed page.
None of this shows up when you read the document. It shows up if the other side — or their counsel — knows to check.
Why it matters here specifically
In most everyday files, leftover metadata is a mild embarrassment. In a negotiation, it can be a liability: a Producer field naming an unexpected third party can undercut an NDA's confidentiality claims, a stray file path can expose which other companies are in a deal, and an author name can identify who drafted a clause both sides agreed to treat as boilerplate. None of that belongs in a document meant to represent a clean, final agreement.
What scrub can do today
scrub reads a PDF on your device — the file is never uploaded — and shows you exactly what's in its Info dictionary and XMP metadata: author, producer, creator, timestamps, and any embedded paths it can find. Right now, PDF handling in scrub is scan-only: it tells you plainly what's there, but it does not yet strip it for you the way it does for images and plain text. We'd rather say that clearly than overclaim.
Once you know what a contract PDF is carrying, most PDF editors let you clear the Author, Producer, Title and Subject fields from their document properties panel by hand before you send the final version. If the file started life as a Word document, it's worth checking the source for tracked changes and comments before exporting, since those can be easier to catch there than after conversion.
The short version
A contract or NDA PDF can carry an author name, an internal file path, or a negotiation timeline in its metadata — none of it visible on the page. scrub shows you what's in a PDF before it goes out, for free and without an upload. Get scrub free and check your next contract before you send it.