Definition:

The broader definition of "redaction" is to edit, compress or alter a document or text. In Legal Process Outsourcing (LPO), the term usually refers to the removal of sensitive data from one or more documents. Typically, the redaction is shown in the form the text physically cut out from the page, or the text itself blacked out on the page. In the day of physical documents, copies of the original documents were made, and redaction sections were removed through the use of a cutting blade or a black marker.


Redaction is needed when documents must be provided in response to a legal request, but there is sensitive information within the documents that are not related to the request. For example, during a lawsuit, a company may be required to produce documents that discuss the marketing budget for a product, but data about the budgets of unrelated products that are also discussed in the documents can be redacted.

In 1996, the Electronic Amendments to the Freedom of Information Act vastly expanded the number of government documents that could be requested by citizens under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Because many government documents contain confidential data (social security numbers, personal addresses, etc.). , the Federal Government was challenged in delivering the documents court required. The inability of manual redaction to keep up with FOIA requests accelerated the adoption of electronic redaction, which uses word searches to find redactable text and then blacks out these sections in the final document (usually Adobe Acrobat or a TIFF format).

The primary flaw in electronic redaction is that documents often contain data other than text, such as graphics. These graphics could be a picture, but they could be tables and graphics, or photographs of documents. These graphics may contain the redactable data, but word searches alone will not find this data. However, modern redaction tools include Optcal Character Recognition (OCR) software that attempts to find words in graphics and include them in the redaction process.