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Valora AutoRedaction

AutoRedaction Overview

At Valora, our goal is always to develop solutions that assist our clients with reducing the costs of manual labor, while improving the overall quality of the completed project. There was no exception to this rule when we rolled out our AutoRedaction service. With AutoRedaction, Valora’s PowerHouseTM processing system automatically performs the redactions using software pattern-matching technology. Anywhere redactions are needed, on image, text, or file, PowerHouse will redact as programmed.

Redaction is a practice used by many disciplines to protect sensitive information, such as personal names, addresses and phone numbers, financial and customer account information, patient health records, and other similar Personally Identifying Information (“PII”) from accidental or unauthorized disclosure. Redactions are also sometimes used to cover specific non-relevant or nondisclosable information from otherwise permissible content. In almost all cases, redaction is used to ensure that sensitive, confidential or privileged information is not disclosed to any party not authorized to receive said information.

Common Examples of Redaction: Litigation Document Production

In a typical litigation production workflow, attorneys manually review all “produceable” documents, image-by-image, watching for any content that should not be disclosed. Once such information is identified, the attorney deletes or “blacks out” the offending content from view. Redactions can occur on visual images, on OCR or extracted text, and on paper. This process is often tedious, error-prone, time consuming and costly.

How AutoRedaction Works

Capitalizing on our extensive experience with pattern-matching technology1 , Valora has built a custom software program that automatically determines the presence of sensitive PII and confidential or privileged information, and then redacts out that information on the image. Redactions can also be made to the underlying text, or on both text and image, if desired. AutoRedaction takes the form of a black block, with or without a representative stamp, such as “Redacted” or “Employee 123.” Redactions can be made permanent, such as for production purposes, or kept temporary, with a technique for “lift and peek,” when desired.

Benefits of Valora AutoRedaction

AutoRedaction is a tremendous cost and time saver when documents must be redacted prior to production to other parties. A person can successfully redact approximately 300 documents/day. With Valora’s AutoRedaction solution, clients are able to redact more than 1 million documents/day. On average, the amount of cost and time saved by this process is more than 1000% over any manual approach.

What is Redaction?

Redaction is a practice used by attorneys and others with a need to provide important documents that contain sensitive information. Before production, the sensitive information must be “stripped” or “obscured from view” so that sensitive information may be preserved and/or protected from unauthorized disclosure. To redact a document, an authorized person reads each page of the document, line-by-line, watching for sensitive information. When it is found, the person “blacks out” the information from view, using either a permanent marker on paper, or black boxes on electronic images.

What is AutoRedaction?

AutoRedaction is an automated version of traditional manualeffort redactions. Software recognizes important content to redact, and then “blacks out” the content from view and from searches.