Redact discovery and court filings without uploading a single file

A black box is not a redaction

The most common redaction mistake is also the most dangerous: drawing a black rectangle over text instead of removing it. The text underneath survives, and anyone can recover it by copying and pasting, or by stripping the overlay. Guidance from the National Security Agency puts it plainly: information that is merely hidden or covered in a document can almost always be recovered, so it has to be removed, not just concealed.

A 2022 study, Story Beyond the Eye: Glyph Positions Break PDF Text Redaction, went further. The researchers tested 11 popular redaction tools, including Adobe Acrobat, and showed that even tools that delete the text often leak the position of every character, enough to reconstruct redacted names. They de-redacted hundreds of real-world redactions in published Inspector General reports and FOIA responses. In discovery, that is the difference between a compliant production and a privacy breach sitting inside the record.

What pixel-burn does differently

RedactProof does not draw over the text. It rasterizes the affected region and burns the redaction into the page, destroying the underlying characters and the spacing between them. The redacted content cannot be copied, searched, or reconstructed from glyph positions. What you redact is gone, not hidden.

Scoping a production

Federal filings have a baseline you can build on. FRCP Rule 5.2 requires parties to redact Social Security and taxpayer-ID numbers, dates of birth, financial account numbers, and the names of minors from documents filed with the court. Treat that as the floor, not the ceiling, and review every responsive document before it leaves the firm.

Third-party personal data. Names, addresses and identifiers of anyone who is not your client, including witnesses, opposing parties and people mentioned in passing.

Privileged material. Attorney-client and work-product communications that have crept into otherwise producible documents.

Irrelevant sensitive content. Medical, financial or other sensitive data that is not responsive and should not be in the production at all.

Bates numbering, logs and proof of integrity

For a court-ready production, RedactProof adds Bates numbering and a CSV log of every redaction, and can attach a tamper-evident, Ed25519-signed certificate. The receiving side scans a QR code to confirm the file has not been altered since you exported it, without needing an account or the original tool.

Consumer and records access requests raise the same redaction problem on a tighter clock. If your team also handles those, see our redaction page for compliance teams.