This article will continue our previous discussion of the digital revolution in the legal environment. Every revolution has hinged on the ability of communications to remain confidential. Imagine how different the Revolutionary War would have been had the British been privy to sensitive information concerning the movement of the colonies’ army. Of course, the solutions to protecting such information have evolved in current times just as methods of warfare have changed with the times, but the main goal of hiding sensitive information remains. In the legal world, this is most often seen in litigation discovery through the redaction of documents.

Redaction has come a long way from the days of using X-acto knives to cut out a piece of paper and cover up redacted parts of the original before photocopying it. With the advent of electronic documents, redaction became more easily performed on a mass scale. Unfortunately, many law firms concluded that the process of “covering up” redacted material could be extrapolated to PDF’s and many documents were improperly redacted by either changing the color of text to that of the background or placing a blank comment box over material to be redacted. Unfortunately, this allowed anyone familiar with Adobe Acrobat to move that blank box or change the text color, thus revealing the sensitive information meant to be redacted.

While previous versions of Adobe Acrobat, the most used program to create PDF’s, allowed for third-party programs to redact PDF’s, this was still dangerous and required numerous workarounds until Acrobat 8.0. With Acrobat 8.0, redaction is easy and quite secure, allowing for the permanent redaction of information from an electronic document as well as the assurance that no other metadata exists in the document.

Prior to actually redacting a document or documents, it helps to take a moment to think about the process and clearly define what your goals are for removing sensitive information. For example, if your goal is to redact a particular name in a document, wherever it is mentioned, it would be advisable to first OCR the document (creating an invisible text layer over the document) so that the PDF is searchable. This would then allow the use of Acrobat’s “Search and Redact” feature to locate each instance of the name, thus saving an enormous amount of time in a multi-page document.

Process of Redaction

Redacting information with Acrobat 8.0 is quite simple. From Acrobat go to View -> Toolbars -> Redaction. This will open the Redaction Toolbar for you. Select Mark for Redaction and use the cursor’s crosshairs to draw a rectangle over the area you would like to redact. You can continue to redact information on the page, moving your cursor over the redacted areas to preview the information redacted.  This will work on images and text and will permanently remove anything within the rectangle you select, replacing the redacted information with a white box. Do to this, it is advisable to always keep a redacted version of a PDF separate from the original so that the redacted information is still maintained.

It is sometimes desirable to have redacted information marked with a black box or marked as “Redacted”.   Acrobat 8.0 allows you to set these kinds of options by right-clicking the redacted item and selecting Properties. From there you can choose redaction color and even add repeating overlay text on top of the redaction box.

Redaction Search Function

Acrobat 8.0 will also allow you to use the search function to redact information which is repeated multiple times in an OCR’d document. In the Redaction Toolbar, select Search and Redact. Type in the text you would like to redact and Acrobat will show you all of the search string instances in your text. You will then be able to check all of those you would like to redact and Acrobat will automatically redact the text throughout the document.

Applying Redaction

Once you have gone through your document and redacted all of the information you need, you must apply your redaction. Select the Apply Redactions button in the Redaction Toolbar. The Examine Document function will appear, allowing you to find additional hidden text and metadata in your PDF and remove it along with your redacted material. To ensure you do not permanently delete important information in your PDF, Acrobat will prompt you to rename the redacted document.

The digital revolution has given lawyers numerous tools to protect our client’s sensitive information and data with redaction of PDF’s being only one of many. The Acrobat redaction feature is powerful so be careful, once the information has been redacted and the redaction applied, the information cannot be recovered form that version of the PDF.