How Lawyers Redact Documents Properly (And Common Mistakes)

In 2019, lawyers representing Paul Manafort submitted a court filing to a federal judge. To hide sensitive information about his interactions with a political consultant, they drew black boxes over the text and saved the PDF.

Within minutes of the document being published online, journalists simply highlighted the black boxes, pressed "Copy," pasted the text into Notepad, and read every single "redacted" word.

It was a humiliating, high-profile mistake. But it happens every single day in HR departments, medical offices, and law firms across the world.

The "Black Box" Fallacy

A PDF is not a flat image; it is a layered digital environment. The text exists on the foundational layer. When you use a generic PDF editor or Apple Preview to draw a black rectangle over a word, you are simply adding a new graphic layer on top of the text.

The underlying text hasn't been deleted. It's just hiding in the shadows. Anyone can bypass the box by highlighting the area and copying the text, or by using a tool to extract the raw text stream.

True Redaction Destroys Data

True redaction doesn't cover up data; it permanently deletes the digital code representing that data from the file architecture, and then draws a black box in its place to indicate something was removed.

Proper legal redaction requires specialized software (like our Redact PDF tool). The process involves:

1. Selecting the target: Highlighting the sensitive words or drawing a region over an image.
2. The burn-in phase: The software completely recalculates the document structure, destroying the text characters, removing the underlying image pixels, and stripping the associated metadata.
3. The final export: The document is re-encoded as a new, clean file.

Three Common Redaction Mistakes

1. Forgetting the Metadata

Even if you use proper redaction software to delete a client's Social Security Number from page 4, you might have forgotten that the document's hidden properties still list the file name as Smith_John_SSN_Filing.pdf and the author as the client's name. Always scrub metadata when redacting.

2. Not Redacting Searchable OCR Text

Sometimes lawyers will print a document, use a physical black Sharpie to cross out names, scan the document back in, and run OCR (Optical Character Recognition) on it to make it searchable. If the OCR software misinterprets the sharpie marks as text, or if the original digital text is still embedded behind the scanned image, the data leaks.

3. Relying on "Flattening"

Flattening a PDF merges visual layers together, which prevents users from easily moving a black box graphic out of the way. However, flattening does not always destroy the underlying text stream. Dedicated extraction tools can often still pull text out of a flattened document.

The Fail-Safe Method

If you don't have access to professional redaction software, the only 100% fail-safe "analog" method is:

1. Print the document.
2. Cut the sensitive information out with scissors (or use heavy, opaque redaction tape).
3. Scan the document back into a computer as a flat TIFF or JPEG image.
4. Convert that image back to a PDF using a JPG to PDF converter.

However, in a digital-first world, simply using a cryptographic redaction tool is much faster, entirely secure, and saves paper.

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