Redact Sign Form Later

How To Redact Sign Document

today I'm going to talk about the right way and the wrong way to redact a document in Acrobat I'm going to open up on my laptop here a motion it's a pretty famous motion is a pretty famous example of the right way and the wrong way to do it but since it's been a couple of years since that happened I thought I'd revisit the issue so that way people don't forget this has come up in clients that we've worked with relatively recently as well and that also had me thinking about it so this was a motion that was brought up during the prosecution of our former governor in Illinois rod Blagojevich and for example on paragraph 9 there were some stuff that was intended to be redacted and the attorneys in this case or the technicians that they relied upon had decided that they could just put black rectangles you can draw shapes lines circles things like that in Acrobat and they decided to draw in black rectangles over the text that they wanted to redact the problem with that method is is that Acrobat keeps things in layers so think of it like in Photoshop or a very complicated slide in PowerPoint things can be on top of things without obliterating what's underneath and so I can go to this paragraph 9 drag and select the entire paragraph hit ctrl C and then open up a word document and paste in all the text that was underneath the black marks and so this comes up a couple of other ways as well when people intend to redact documents either because a trade secret protection work product or client confidentiality they'll still exchange materials and then the other side suddenly has information that is supposed to be secret but was underneath the redacted information the ethics of that is not something that I'll go into here but it's definitely a problem and something that does come up because once that comes out of the bag whatever that intended to be protected information is when it gets out it's out no matter how much constructive pretend fiction we try to put back into it and so here's the right way to do something like that the right way to do that is to come to your tools and Adobe Acrobat if you're using the DC version you'll come to the tools ribbon here if you're using older versions of Acrobat Pro you'll come up to the upper right hand corner up here that's where your tools are and if you're not sure what I always recommend is just type in what you want to do so you can type in redact because that's what I want to do and it'll show me the tool that I need otherwise if I don't want to do it that way here's how I can find it I can scroll down past these couple of different categories and in the...