2019 may well end up being the year of redaction as it continues to make big headlines globally: The Justice Department Has Clarified Why It Redacted The Mueller Report, Paul Manafort’s Lawyers Tried—and Failed—to Redact This Sensitive Legal Filing, How a Simple Copy/Paste Revealed Explosive New Detail in Manafort’s Case.
DocsCorp, a leading legal technology provider, recently published an industry guide on redaction best practices entitled The Ultimate Guide to Redaction: What Works, What Doesn’t, to educate people about redaction errors. The report looked at why so many legal professionals and others continue to get redaction wrong.
Masking is not redacting
The report concluded that most people mask confidential information in Word and PDF documents with mark-up tools thinking that this is the same as redaction—presumably, what can’t be seen, can’t be read. However, this is not the case. True redaction requires the information to be removed or “burned out” of the document. Only a native PDF redaction tool will do this in a safe and efficient manner.
PDF documents are constructed in layers—for example, text is on one layer and images on another, bookmarks on yet another etc. Thus, simply masking the text or image is not a foolproof method of redaction as you are simply adding annotations to the annotation layer. The text layer remains untouched. Copying the text from the PDF and pasting it into a new Word document will expose the hidden text. Also, flattening a PDF is not the same as burning in a redaction. Flattening simply merges everything onto the text layer, which can be copied despite the black boxes.
The right tool for redaction
So how do you ensure that you have the right tool for the job? Basically, you need a PDF application with a native redaction tool. Only PDF can provide
