Clumsy Redaction Can Spell Negligence
"I speak of redacting electronic documents by converting them to TIFF images, blacking out privileged and confidential content, then clumsily attempting to recreate electronic searchability by optical character recognition. When applied to spreadsheets and databases, it simply doesn't work. Why, then, are we content to spin invisible cloth rather than acknowledge the emperor's privates are on parade?
Good sense and fair play dictate that redaction methods preserve the integrity of unredacted content and the searchability and usability of the document. Instead, expediency and anxiety drive use of TIFF and OCR for redaction, enabling counsel to cling to familiar, if shopworn, "black line" redaction methods out of fear that privileged contents lurk in some dark digital recess."
