WORD FILES - Date modified query - URGENT

fwor

The problem that I think you will face in trying to get a definitive answer is that it's very unlikely that anyone here could reproduce all of the steps that the document might have gone through (e.g. created under Word97 on a WinXP based PC, emailed using Outlook to a work PC running Win2000, opened with the Office 2000 version of Word, etc...). Any of those ~might~ have changed the file's modified date.

What you can be sure of, though, is that if your PC has not been isolated and can be proven to be free from tampering then his threats about forensic evidence are meaningless. The police in the UK learned that the hard way, by losing what looked to be clear-cut criminal cases by not placing computer equipment into strictly isolated conditions before examining them.

At a simpler level, he can't ~prove~ that the date and time were correctly set on your home PC, so you can - if you choose - dispute the file attributes on that basis alone. For example, if your home PC's clock was wrong by several days, a file modified at home could later seem to have been modified while you were actually at work.

In reality, it looks as though he is just trying to intimidate you with talk of forensic evidence, and your best defence (IMO) would be to let him know that any such evidence could be repudiated with ease.