Redaction

You can access the Redaction section from Document Viewer>Doc Tab. You can modify images or files opened in the Document Viewer, removing portions of the file for privacy reasons. Redaction is not just covering up parts of a file, redaction digitally removes sections of the file so that users can no longer see confidential information. You can either redact documents directly or manually upload documents already redacted to you cases in The eDiscovery Platform.

NOTE: This feature is not available for Read-Only or Limited Users.

Redacting Documents In The eDiscovery Platform

This option allows you to create your own redacted version of natives files or any PDFs recently uploaded, without affecting or automatically deleting the original one (except for .MGS files). Redaction is a tricky area and fraught with potential problems and complications. Some companies have made substantial embarrassing and redaction errors and inadvertently produce or disclose information in purportedly redacted documents. One area of errors has been redacting PDFs with computer file editor drawing tools (e.g., markers, black rectangles) that redact the page image in a PDF file, but do not remove the associated text embedded in the file. Suggestions for proper methodology are described (below) and also in our technical notes.

To find out if a file is redactable (includes a normalized PDF version), please open it from the Document Viewer. When the Page and PDF tabs are both grayed out, that means you cannot apply redaction to the files. In that case, you have the following options:

-Re-upload files you wish to apply redaction in order to update the database. Don't forget to delete the duplicates

-Use Manual Redaction in the existing files without a normalized PDF version

To use this feature the following steps should be taken, which are detailed below:

1) From the Browse or Search pages, click on the title of a particular document you want to redact
2) Navigate from the top menu to the Redaction section (Document Viewer>Doc Tab)
3) Click ' Open Redaction Editor' hyperlink

Redaction Editor Page

When you open the Redaction Editor page, you will see the message 'Redaction images are being created.' Refresh the current page and as result of that button click event, it will safely open only the file to be redacted.

>Select the area to redact with your mouse. It should draw a gray box around your selection and automatically open the 'Edit Redaction' Box

>In the Redaction Text, enter your custom message that can be saved, deleted or even canceled

>Once the text or graphic has been covered, you can click on the 'Save Redaction' button and the area selected will display how the redacted version of the file will look like (see example below)

>The 'Undo' button gives you the chance to go back to the 'Redaction Editor Page' and edit your redaction

>Review your final redaction and then click on the 'Apply Current Redaction' button. This action will ask you to 'Refresh' the page and create the final Redaction PDF version

>Close the Current Redaction Editor, the Document Viewer tabs and then wait a few seconds on the queue to complete the task. You should expect some delay when creating a redaction image, especially if you are redacting large PDF documents since that can take several minutes to be generated, and internet speed can also slow the view

>Once the redaction is completed the 'Redacted' tab will display its version in the Document Viewer page, while you can still view the underacted version from the Page, Doc and Original tabs

>Please also note that once you apply the redaction to a document, it goes back into the queue and will not allow further redactions until it is done applying current ones.

Which Version Will Be In My Production?

Only the redacted versions will be automatically included into the productions under the
'PDF', 'TIFF' and 'TEXT' sub-folders.

Working With Redacted Documents

From the Browse and Search pages you can display the built-in column 'IsRedacted', and also apply filter to view only the redacted version of the documents 'Show Redacted Only'.

Upload Manual Redaction

You can also upload files previously redacted by choosing the 'Upload Manual Redaction' button. Please note that if redacted document versions of the same file already exists, uploading a new redacted PDF will overwrite existing redacted documents. For more details please follow our instructions under the Manual Redaction page.

If you have any questions, ideas or suggestions, please do not hesitate to contact us!

Redacting Original PDFs

Redaction only works for original PDFs uploaded to the case(s). Before redacting a PDF file, please go to the Browse or Search pages and click on the Columns>Show Columns section to select the field 'Original Ext'. If you see an extension other than 'PDF' that means the following:

1- The file is not an original PDF and will also be grayed out under the Doc or Page tabs from the Document Viewer

2- You cannot to apply redaction. If that is your case, try to upload the original PDF version of the same file(s) or please let Sales or Customer Service.

.MGS Files

It is possible to open .MSG files within the eDiscovery Platform and even use the search function of the text to locate the message of interest by whatever keywords you expect to be in the message as a single document. The major problem is that the email message files tend to expand into attachments that might not be recursively unpacked and appended to the message body; therefore, you will not be able to apply redaction to all the natives within the attached container.

In the picture beside text, we see different attachments to an email. When you upload .MGS files to the eDiscovery Platform, finding all versions of the natives can be tricky as they may be part of container file as well (e.g., a redacted Word attachment to an email may be in a Word DOC file, embedded in the containing MSG email, that may be embedded in an Outlook PST archive, and the PST may be embedded in a ZIP archive, etc.).