Another Spectacular Redaction Fail

As reported previously (see, e.g., here, here, here, and here), Paul Manafort’s lawyers did a bad job redacting a pleading in his criminal case. The pleading is available here. Starting on page 5 are numerous redactions. If you highlight the redactions and “copy” and “paste” them into a new document, you can see all the text underneath the redactions. So this was a big ol’ redaction fail. I’ve written previously on how to properly redact a document. If you don’t know how to properly redact a document, it’s likely time to learn, because the minute a pleading is filed on PACER, the cat’s out of the bag (in a high-profile case at least; in a run-of-the-mill case that no one is monitoring other than the parties, you can generally call down to the Clerk’s office and get them to remove or “lock down” the mistakenly filed pleading).