Courts in the Northern District of Texas require, in certain instances, parties to redact filings (e.g., when filing briefs that contain materials designated under the Court’s Protective Order). Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 5.1 requires redaction of certain sensitive personal information. And nobody’s client wants its confidential material in public filings. Many times, a party electronically redacts the information that should be redacted, and often times this redaction is unsuccessful.
Here’s a “Redacted Order” from the District of Minnesota where the Court tried—but failed—to redact allegedly sensitive material from the filing. Anyone who knows how to “copy” and “paste” from a pdf document can determine what is underneath the black highlights on p. 5 of the memorandum, because the Court simply highlighted the text black—it did not properly redact the text.
There are at least two ways to solve this problem. First, the Court could have printed this document to a printer (as opposed to a pdf), and then scanned the document. The document would not have appeared as clean (since it was printed and then scanned to a pdf), but the material that should have been redacted would not be able to be seen in the scanned pdf.
Second, the Court could have properly redacted the document electronically (as opposed to simply highlighting the material in black). To do this in Adobe Acrobat Pro, follow the following steps.
1. Print your document to pdf.
2. Select Advanced, Redaction, Mark for Redaction.
3. Highlight the material from the document you want to redact. A red box will show up around it.
4. When you’ve finished highlighting the material you want redacted, right click on it, and select Apply Redactions. Click OK. The material will have been redacted, and a viewer of the document cannot see what is under the redaction by “cutting” and “pasting” the text underneath the redaction.