The widespread impact of the amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) has heightened awareness of document review and production in ways that have transformed the process. Judges are more attentive and adversaries are far more sophisticated. The importance of redaction cannot be overstressed. A single electronic file may contain privileged information, as well as relevant, non-privileged and discoverable details. A producing party and its lawyers are obliged to produce the latter but must protect the privilege as to the former. Platforms that permit redaction facilitate production of responsive information while protecting the privilege.

According to FRCP Rule 5.2, the following types of data must be redacted before filing documents:

• all but the last four digits of a social security number and taxpayer identification number
• the month and day of an individual’s birth
• a minor’s name (only their initials may be used)
• all but the last four digits of financial account numbers

These points are meant to be merely guidelines. If the last four digits of an individual’s social security number are irrelevant to a particular matter, the entire number can be redacted.

As part of a complete technical solution for discovery, Informative Graphics recently announced the release of Redact-It® Desktop 1.1 for removal of sensitive content and privacy information such as social security numbers, names and phone numbers before making documents widely available. The software dramatically reduces the time it takes to redact, review and release documents for public access, eDiscovery and other processes. Redact-It Desktop 1.1 applies powerful redaction capabilities to Microsoft Word, Outlook, PowerPoint and Excel, the most widely used software programs in the world, while providing OCR (Optical Character Recognition) processing of documents to convert PDFs and TIFFs into text-searchable files.

“Extending the power of Redact-It to popular Microsoft programs people use across every industry is critically important,” said Gary Heath, President and CEO of IGC. “Privacy and attorney-client privilege laws mandate that attorneys, government officials and health care professionals ensure confidential information is not inadvertently released. With Redact-It Desktop 1.1, we’ve made it easy for them to securely remove information in documents requested whether for discovery, information disclosure or those they create and share every day.”

A 15-day trial version is available at: http://www.redact-it.com/download/. The base version of Redact-It Desktop 1.1 is available immediately and priced at $195 with the OCR option available for an additional $49 USD.

Other members of the Redact-It family include Redact-It Enterprise Server for batch and automated redaction as part of workflow processes, and Redact-It for Kofax® Ascent Capture®, which works directly within the Kofax batch process to remove the data from selected redaction zones with associated OCR text, typically as files are bulk loaded into a document repository. For more information, visit http://www.redact-it.com.

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