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How to Save Time and Reduce Risk with Redact for RelativityOne

Andrea Beckman

Privacy and transparency of information have never been more important. In our digital age, the public expects heaps of information to be delivered to them at lightning-fast speeds.

That need for speed, coupled with your obligation to protect private and sensitive information that may be hidden in large data sets, leaves a lot of responsibility on your shoulders to quickly and accurately redact documents—whether you're preparing for litigation, responding to a FOIA request, or conducting an investigation.

Put simply: Missing redactions is never an option, and the technology to automate them shouldn't be either.

The Volume and Cost of Privacy

Keeping up with privacy regulations is no easy task. With regulations such as GDPR and the CCPA, organizations have a unique responsibility to protect consumer data.

This comes on top of ever-increasing volumes of data requests. The United States government has received over 800,000 FOIA requests each year since 2018. In addition to these piles of requests, corporations and law firms face a truly staggering volume of personally identifiable information (PII) that must be protected. PII includes names, email addresses, home addresses, passport and driver’s license numbers, employment status, criminal record, age, ethnicity, race—the list goes on. Identifying and redacting all of these diverse forms of data is not a simple task.

Plus, it is not cheap. A 2020 research report shows that businesses in the UK spend, on average, £1.59 million and 14 person years annually processing DSARs. That huge monetary and time cost can increase because of a lack of process optimization and a lack of automation. 

How to Get it Done in RelativityOne

This is why we're excited about Redact for RelativityOne, a highly advanced smart redaction solution we released in February 2021. We've acquired a perpetual license to Milyli's Blackout solution and integrated it into RelativityOne at no additional cost, so you can take advantage of its market-leading capabilities with no barrier to use.

To date, RelativityOne users with additional licenses via Milyli have made more than 500 million redactions using Blackout. Now that it’s part and parcel of the platform, we're excited to see all of our customers integrate automated redactions into their workflows. Within the first few days of launching Redact, teams like yours collectively applied over 25 million redactions—obviously eager to get started. 

Redact is another step in delivering a simply powerful platform for all your legal and compliance needs. With Redact integrated into our Aero UI, you can spend less time manually redacting documents and more time focusing on value-driven activities.

Redact allows you to redact several file types—including images, spreadsheets, and PDFs—in three simple steps.

First, you define the rules you'd like to use to automate each project. Rules determine the type of information you'd like to redact: social security numbers, addresses, and so on. You can choose to either redact or highlight for each rule you set, and determine if you'd like to just redact that information or the whole phrase in which it’s written. You can choose from a selection of pre-defined regular expression rules for PII patterns, manually add your own rules, or upload them from a CSV. This will be the foundation of your redaction project.

After your rules are set, you're ready to start automatically redacting. You'll be brought to a page where you can confirm what you're about to do, and then start running your redactions. Redact will go through the documents in your selected saved search and begin redacting and highlighting based on your rules.

The final step is to QC your project once Redact has finished its work. You'll be brought to a page summarizing the work Redact did with any warnings you can easily review. There’s an intuitive QC workflow to help you quickly review any questionable documents and redactions. You can even choose to accept or reject all the markups in a document with mass operations.

It's as simple as define, automate, and QC to create quick, accurate, and secure redactions—so you can avoid the financial, operational, and reputational risk associated with human error in applying redactions.

Watch an On-Demand Overview of Redact for RelativityOne

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