GE's Opponent Brings Bad Things to Light

Today's Law.com newswire featured an article from The Connecticut Law Tribune called, "GE Suffers a Redaction Disaster" that details how plaintiffs' counsel in a class action sex discrimination case against General Electric allowed confidential information to be made available on the federal PACER filing system by misusing the black block approach to redaction.  Though the precise method by which the pooch was rudely ravished is not stated in the article, you can be sure that some unhappy soul used the PDF highlighter tool to paint redacted text in black such that--black-on-black--it appeared unreadable.  Of course, this does nothing to scrub the data layer of the PDF, and one need only block, copy and paste to read everything that was "redacted."

The amazing thing isn't that this happened, but that it is still happening with regularity.  This snakebit approach to redaction has caused so much front page grief, it's a wonder that every firm (and every legal malpractice carrier) hasn't had a warning memo in firmwide circulation since, say, 2005 when an embarassingly detailed "redacted" report of our troops in Iraq firing on the rescuers of kidnapped Italian journalist, Giuliana Sgrena, proved to be redacted in the same flawed manner. [The article mentions the Sgrena fiasco, and Ms. Sgrena may be distressed to read the premature report of la sua morte.  She was shot, but survived.  Sadly, one of her rescuers, Nicola Calipari, was not so lucky].

So how do we stop this sort of boneheaded redaction from continuing?  There are a lot of new ways to redact electronic documents, including practical and cost-effective native redaction mechanisms.  But, that's not what this post is about.  Instead, I want to address how GE's misfortune could have been avoided without anyone buying new tools or performing major digital surgery. 

I have to assume that the folks redacting the GE documents for the D.C. law firm of Sanford, Wittels & Heisler didn't have a copy of Acrobat 8, because it does a fine, reliable job with redaction, insuring that redacted data is no longer in the document--anywhere.  The interface needs some work, but it meets the objectives.

Assuming one has only an older version of Acrobat, there's still an effective way to obliterate selected content and still use that black-on-black redaction method lawyers love.  Acrobat allows PDFs to be saved as TIFFs (File>Save As>Save as Type>TIFF).  Thus, you can successfully "redact" in Acrobat using the black on black (black highlighting) method disastrously employed by GE's opponents IF the results are saved as TIFFs.  TIFF'ing strips away the data layer, so there is no chance of block-and-copy recovery of redacted content.  It's really, truly gone. 

Obviously, the shortcoming here is the loss of electronic searchability inherent to a naked TIFF, so it's not a perfect solution.  You could pull the TIFF back into Acrobat (Create PDF>From File) and then use Acrobat to OCR the text, resulting in (largely) restored searchability, reliable redaction and the PDF deliverable that PACER requires.  I wouldn't want to do this at any great scale, but it's not too onerous for small collections.

It's a tip that comes too late for Sanford, Wittels & Heisler and General Electric, but hopefully in time to protect you and your clients.

Comments

[Tom O'Connor]

I thought the best part of the GE case was this comment in the law.com article:

"Plaintiff's attorney Sanford couldn't say what process or software his law firm used to redact the information in the Schaefer case. "Quite frankly, I'm not involved in the mechanics," he said.
Paralegals were responsible for redacting the information properly before filing the briefs electronically, but they were out of the office and unavailable for comment last Thursday, Sanford said."

Gotta love an attorney who says he has no idea how things under his supervision actually work and then throws his staff under the bus .... in a news article! What a guy.