Document Production: Removing Private Information On A Bulk Basis

FindLaw

By Eric Sinrod

We live in a day and age of massive productions of documents and electronic data. Governmental entities have affirmative obligations to produce information pursuant to open access laws like the Freedom of Information Act. And parties in litigation constantly are subject to intrusive discovery requests.

It is difficult enough simply to round up and harvest documents and data that must be produced as part of these efforts. However, that is not the end of the job.

It frequently is important to remove personally identifiable information relating to individuals from the productions. For example, often times names, social security numbers, addresses, credit card numbers, medical information and the like must be redacted before documents and data can be turned over to the requesting parties.

Sound easy? Not so fast. This can be a Herculean effort requiring the time and attention (translation: serious monetary cost) of lawyers, paralegals and clerks as they comb through many thousands of pages and vast quantities of data. So, what to do?

Well, help may be on the way. Informative Graphics Corporation (IGC) has just announced the release of its next-generation Redact-It Enterprise Server software.

According to IGC, Redact-It is the only full, highly scalable solution encompassing scanning, desktop and server software that can "intelligently detect and automatically remove privacy information such as social security numbers, names and phone numbers before making documents secure and available to a wider audience."

And once private information is redacted, the software, according to IGC, creates a new PDF, TIFF or secure Content Sealed Format (CSF) rendition, "leaving the source file untouched." Thus, as IGC states, metadata and redacted data are not transferred to the rendition.

This type of solution, if it proves successful, is truly needed for government and litigants. Indeed, such a solution would have been very valuable in the massive tobacco litigation, in which voluminous governmental Medicare records had to be produced to the defendant tobacco companies - records that contained social security numbers and private medical information.

Time will tell whether Redact-It gets the job done and to what extent. For example, can it redact native format documents en masse? But at least technology here is moving in the right direction. And even with technological advances, we still need the human element minding the privacy store.

Eric Sinrod is a partner in the San Francisco office of Duane Morris LLP (http://www.duanemorris.com) where he focuses on litigation matters of various types, including information technology and intellectual property disputes. His Web site is http://www.sinrodlaw.com and he can be reached at ejsinrod@duanemorris.com. To receive a weekly email link to Mr. Sinrod's columns, please send an email to him with Subscribe in the Subject line.

This column is prepared and published for informational purposes only and should not be construed as legal advice. The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the author's law firm or its individual partners.

Electronic Discovery