There is a real cost to manual redaction other than time. A 578-page document will be missing a lot of important information if a paralegal takes two days to redact the confidential information from it; a compliance team working through hundreds of medical records by hand is also at risk of missing something crucial. Once a social security number is exposed, once one financial detail is uncovered in a court filing, it’s done.
But automated redaction software can get the job done quickly, accurately, and permanently with the paper trail for very large volumes of documents, thanks to AI capabilities. Let’s talk about the best tools on the market, how each is good, and where each is appropriate.
Elements to consider when choosing automated redaction software
When comparing tools, it’s important to have an understanding of the differences between a strong platform and a simple one.
- The basis of AI detection accuracy is the foundation. Not only should the software be able to accurately detect personal identifiable information (PII), protected health information, financial information, and recognizable patterns such as social security numbers and telephone numbers, but it should also recognize other types of sensitive information. It also needs to automatically remove embedded metadata, hidden content.
- OCR support is significant to anybody working with scanned files. If there is no OCR, then the software will not recognize any image-based documents, eliminating a large segment of the actual workflow in documents.
- Running at Scale to see if a tool is suitable for multiple documents or just a one-off job. If you have hundreds or thousands of files, you need a platform that can automatically redact the information in a large volume.
- Audit trails are a necessity. All three regulations, HIPAA, GDPR, and FOIA mandate some type of documentation of what was redacted and who did it and why. This is automatically done with built-in redaction certificates and logs.
Last but not least, consider user-friendliness. The most effective redaction software is the one that your team uses in the proper manner and not the software that takes weeks to master.
The most effective automated redaction software to use.
1. Redactable
Redactable is the best general purpose document redaction tool for businesses that fear the need for a major IT overhaul but require rapid and precise redaction. It’s a cloud-based solution designed for PDFs and scanned documents on legal, healthcare, government, finance and insurance workflows.
The auto-detection from the AI names, addresses, social security numbers, phone numbers, credit card numbers, medical record numbers and more – 40+ sensitive data categories are automatically detected.
At scale, the key feature of Redactable is its ability to conduct automatic audit trails, batch upload files and utilizes OCR. Before redaction runs, scanned papers are fed through our state-of-the-art OCR so that the handwritten notes and image-based PDFs are 100% searchable. It captures all actions automatically, including who redacted what, when and why, and creates a redaction certificate, no manual effort required. One lawyer said that he saved over 30 hours in a medical records project that involved more than 1,000 pages of medical records than he would have spent working on them by hand.
Redactable is SOC 2 Type II certified, HIPAA compliant (with BAA), and integrates with Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, Box, SharePoint, and Clio. The service has no cost for a trial run, and it doesn’t require a credit card.
Redactable is perfect for government, compliance, healthcare, and legal teams that have high volumes of PDF and scanned documents that require permanent redactions, audit trails and no onboard.
2. CaseGuard Studio
CaseGuard has a different slant: it’s created for groups working with a variety of file formats, not simply documents. It supports video, audio, images and 750+ document formats in one place, fitting for law enforcement and legal discovery, and for organisations dealing with mixed media evidence.
CaseGuard automatically detects and redactes 30+ types of PII and PHI for document redaction. Organizations with unique terminology can create their own list of sensitive words, phrases, and patterns to automatically detect and redact it in hundreds of documents at a time, which standard AI models might overlook. It’s a on-prem application, ideal for agencies with data residency requirements.
CaseGuard is suitable for Law enforcement, eDiscovery, and Compliance teams that are managing video, audio, and document evidence in one application.
3. Objective Redact
Objective Redact is intended for disclosure and compliance sensitive environments such as government agencies that process Freedom of Information requests. The platform’s OCR and automation capabilities allow it to search on any file-type for specific targets, such as social security numbers, credit card numbers, tax file numbers, regular expressions, email addresses, phrases, and automatically redact it.
The feature that is outstanding is exemption code support. Users can choose to redact one or multiple items at a time and, by using FOIA exemption codes, Privacy Act codes, or custom codes, can provide the legal justification for each redaction directly in the file in a single click. That is very important for government workflows where the reasons for withholding information must be defensible.
Objective Redact always saves a working copy by not altering the original document, and produces a final redacted copy as well as optionally an audit copy. Governance reports built in will indicate redacted material, number of instances, the exemption codes used, and the number of pages involved.
Objective Redact helps government agencies, FOIA teams and compliance departments implement legal exemption codes and generate verifiable disclosure reports.
4. Imprima Smart Redaction
Imprima is specially designed for due diligence, especially when dealing with M&A and cross-border legal transactions which involve documents in multiple languages. In internal testing, the platform yielded a range of recall percentages between 91–98% across four languages, which is significant for a group that has limited resources to risk losing critical information that is embedded in French, German, or Spanish contracts.
Ideal for international deal workflows for multilingual teams – particularly M&A teams, law firms and financial institutions handling large volumes of international documents that contain PII in multiple languages.
5. DocDefender
Designed for policing and public sector disclosure, DocDefender is built from ground-up for that purpose. It is an AI-powered, cloud-based SaaS that can process high volumes of documents rapidly. The type of throughput that is relevant during a force’s response to a FOIA request or when creating evidence disclosure under a strict timeline.
Staff stays involved: AI recommends redactions, staff reviews and approves before being finalized. Human review layer helps minimize errors, and provides an agency with a defensible process! One user told me that the 578 pages of a phone download was redacted in 20 minutes, whereas it would take her two full days to do it manually.
When dealing with a high volume of evidence in a disclosure process or other environment that requires compliance, police forces and public safety agencies can easily minimise manual work and human error by using DocDefender.
6. iDox.ai
iDox.ai Suite is a privacy-first toolkit that integrates redaction, data masking and data anonymization in one workflow to allow teams to share, publish and analyze information safely. It supports PDFs, Word, scanned documents and more and is SOC 2 and ISO27001 compliant, with 256-bit AES encryption and 2048-bit SSL encryption for uploading and sharing documents. Be aware of the company’s Chinese ownership which may be a concern for some US-based companies.
It has more than 47 supported file formats and AI capability to identify all kinds of sensitive data, including PII, financial data, medical information, and more. A management console is located across the platform, consolidating policy management, roles and access control, audit reporting and integrations into one control plane for compliance teams to manage data risk.
Unlike those that are only document workflow tools, iDox.ai has Guardrail, an AI agent that operates on desktop and mobile devices to audit users’ typing/pasting into AI tools and applies privacy and IP protection policies before exposing data.
More than 15,000 organizations trust the platform, one of which said it experienced a 97% cut in redaction time.
What’s the difference between a good and great redaction tool?
The majority of the redaction tools will redact sensitive text. The more good ones go further.
- The first thing to look at is a permanent vs. cosmetic redaction. The text is not erased from a PDF if you cover it with a black box with a standard PDF editor. With the right tool, anyone can pop up the overlay and read the text beneath. With true automated redaction, the underlying text is destroyed and metadata is stripped, resulting in the loss of all data. Redactable, for instance, not only restricts the visibility of the redacted text, but also hides the document elements that are being redacted as well.
- The quality of the OCR determines whether or not the scanned documents are redacted, or whether they are only partially redacted. With a weak OCR layer, the AI will not be able to detect what it cannot read. This is important particularly for medical records, legal documents and older scanned records that were not intended to be scanned as text.
- Audit trails are a part of compliance infrastructure. You have to provide a proof of what was redacted, when, and by whom, in any regulated industry, such as healthcare, finance, or government. A tool that automatically generates redaction certificates will save the manual effort and produce documents that will withstand legal or regulatory challenges.
- Exemption codes have a particular but necessary function, to explain to the recipient why information was not provided. This is not a nice to have, it is required law for the government to comply for FOIA responses.
Which Automated Redaction Software to use?
The best tool for the job is the one that best suits the way your team operates, the amount of material you handle, the kinds of files you work with and the regulations you must follow.