Batch Redaction – Knowledge Base

Batch redactions allow you to redact terms and phrases from multiple documents at once from a results table. Batch redactions save time when there are specific words, phrases, or patterns (such as email address or other personally identifiable information) that you want to redact from multiple documents.

Note

Only spreadsheets and documents with PDFs and embedded text can be batch redacted.

Perform a batch redaction

To perform a batch redaction:

Open a results table of the documents you would like to redact. You can do this by running a search for the documents, or by opening the documents from a homepage card.
Select which documents you would like to redact using the checkboxes on the left side of each document’s row. By default, all the documents in your results table are selected, but you can select and deselect documents by clicking the checkboxes in the document’s row.
- Batch redactions are run on refreshed search results, even if you have not refreshed your search. This means that all selected documents will be redacted, as well as any documents that fit your search criteria but are not displayed in the results table. To display all documents to be redacted, click the Refresh button in the results table toolbar.
Select Batch > Redact. A redaction panel appears for you to enter the document text and/or metadata to redact.
Enter or select the terms or metadata fields you wish to redact.
- Click on the text box under Redact a term to see a dropdown of persistent highlight categories, as well as individual persistent highlights.
  - If you select a persistent highlights category, you can expand the name of the category to view the underlying persistent highlights.
- Click on Redact metadata fields to see a dropdown of all visible metadata fields on your documents.
- To redact a new term or phrase: type it into the textbox and hit "Enter". You can run and redact simple keyword searches. For example, to redact any instance of the word “California” or the word “Oakland,” you can run a boolean search for “california OR oakland.”
  - You can also run and redact advanced content searches. For example, you could redact all strings in which the words “summary” and “report” appear within five words of each other. This would redact “summary” and “report,” as well as any (five or fewer) words that appear between them.
You can see a preview of the text to be redacted under Sample hits, the Total documents that will be affected by the batch redaction per term, and the number of Non-redactable documents.
- Sample hits are generated from the text of the selected documents in your results table and you can use them to QA your intended redactions.
  Note: only 30 terms generate live hits, although all terms with hits will be redacted.
- Non-redactable documents can't be redacted because they do not have images with embedded text
  - You can view a report of which documents were and were not redacted after completing the batch redaction task from the card in the Batches & Exports column.
- Counts of non-redactable hits cannot be generated for metadata
Once you have entered the terms or phrases you would like to redact, select Configure redactions.
In Configure redaction settings you can add redaction stamps, notes, and configure your redaction dependency settings for spreadsheets.

If you apply a note during the batch redaction, the same note will appear on all redacted documents. This note is at the document level, rather than a redaction note linked to the particular redaction. One note is added per redacted document, rather than one note per redaction.
When you are done, select Next.
In Configure PII redaction type, there are partial redaction options for the terms that match potential PII formats. You can choose a partial redaction format for each batch redaction term.
- Note: Metadata or advanced search terms (regex, wildcard, fuzzy, proximity) do not have partial redaction options.
Once you have configured your batch redaction, click Apply. This will start a batch action that can be monitored from the homepage under Batches & Exports. Here are more details about redacting spreadsheets:

By default, spreadsheets on Everlaw do not have images (PDFs) and redactions are applied to the native file. If you have created images of a spreadsheet, batch redactions are still applied to the native file. They are not applied to the image. When you produce the document, the image will be withheld with a placeholder.
Spreadsheet batch redactions are limited to 5000 redactions across all pages of the spreadsheet. This limit applies to both batch redactions from the results table and the Redact all instances button in the review window. If a batch redaction creates more than 5000 redactions on one spreadsheet, that spreadsheet will not be redacted, and this failure will be indicated on the Batches & Exports card and associated CSV. Other documents in the batch redaction will still be redacted.
Spreadsheets that are too large to be searched in the review window are not redacted from a batch redaction. In the review window, spreadsheets that are too large to redact display the warning: This spreadsheet document is too large to search fully. Only the first 200,000 cells are searchable. Please download the spreadsheet file to search the rest of the document.

Note

If you redact a large number of documents (e.g., all documents in your project), the task may take many hours to complete. Once your batch redaction has completed, its batch action card will tell you whether the batch redaction was completed successfully. If none of your documents were batch redacted, you’ll see a red notification . You can click the document count to go to a search of the documents, or click the download button to view a basic CSV report.

A batch redaction may also be partially successful, meaning that some documents were redacted and others were not. By downloading the report, you can see whether contents and/or metadata were redacted.

Batch delete redactions

You can delete redactions in a batch. These can be redactions that were created as batch redactions or redactions created in the review window. You may batch delete a set of redactions or opt to delete all redactions.

Required permissions: Users with Admin redaction permissions can delete redactions created by anyone. Users with Create redaction permissions can only delete redactions that they created.

Batch delete redactions by text, metadata, or stamp

To batch delete a set of redactions by text, metadata, or stamp:

Open a results table containing the relevant documents.
Use the table rows’ checkboxes to select your target documents from the table. All rows are selected by default.
Select Batch > Redact.

This opens the redaction panel.
Select Delete.

By default, Delete specific redactions is selected.
Choose the values for which you want to delete redactions. You may select one or more values from any of the following fields:
- Delete document text redactions: This field allows you to search for redacted words or phrases.
  Tip
  
  You may want to consider the following:
  - You can search for persistent highlights and persistent highlight categories, and enter most regular expressions (regex). For batch redaction deletion searches, if your search term is in quotes, you cannot use wildcards in conjunction with the following three symbols: [@ . '] [“at” symbol, period, apostrophe]. In this case, wildcards will behave like normal asterisks.
  - Batch un-redacting by text match will only work for text redactions that are an exact match for the phrase searched. Metadata, media, spreadsheet, image, and full-page redactions are not included in the batch deletion.
- Delete metadata field redaction: This field allows you to delete all redactions on a particular metadata field.
- Delete redactions by stamp: This field allows you to delete redactions with a specific redaction stamp, regardless of whether the redaction is of an image, a full-page, or metadata.
  
  Note
  
  Some redactions may contain multiple stamps. To fully delete a redaction by stamp, all stamps applied to the redaction must be selected for deletion.
  If only a subset of stamps is chosen, the redaction is retained with the remaining stamps, while the selected stamps are removed.
  
  Your selections appear in a table with sample hits and the number of total document hits.
When ready, select Delete redactions.
A confirmation dialog appears.
To confirm the batch deletion, select Delete.
A card is automatically generated in the Batches & Exports column on the homepage. For more information about this card, visit the section below titled Revisit batch redaction deletions.

Batch delete all redactions

To batch delete all redactions for a set of documents:

Open a results table containing the relevant documents.
Use the table rows’ checkboxes to select your target documents from the table. All rows are selected by default.
Select Batch > Redact.

This opens the redaction panel.
Select Delete.
Choose Delete all redactions.
Select the Delete all redactions button.

A confirmation dialog appears.
To confirm the batch deletion, select Delete.
A card is automatically generated in the Batches & Exports column on the homepage. For more information about this card, visit the section below titled Revisit batch redaction deletions.

Revisit batch redaction deletions

When you batch delete redactions, a card is automatically generated in the Batches & Exports column on the homepage. From this card you can:

View how many documents were un-redacted. Select the number to go to a search of all documents affected by this deletion.
Download a CSV containing information about the deleted redactions.
Select Undo to undo the batch deletion. Keep in mind the following:
- Undoing a batch deletion also generates a Batch Action card. If any documents have been deleted or reprocessed, Everlaw is not able to undo a completed redaction deletion on those documents.
- If new metadata redactions or full-page redactions have been created where redactions were removed, Everlaw does not replace the new redactions with the deleted ones.
- You can download a report of successful and unsuccessful redaction replacement on the undo batch action card.