During the course of your review, you may need to reveal previously redacted information due to changes in case strategy, court orders or updated confidentiality agreements…. or realize a mistake was made in a specific way over a large set of documents. Mass redactions edits and removals will help you to more quickly and confidently make these changes to help increase both your review speed and accuracy. Over a given search set of documents you might want to correct a spelling mistake for a redaction reason, swap one reason for another, perform a redactions color change or add a reason when one isn't present.
As with all technologies that automate Ediscovery, we recommend exercising due diligence with mass redactions edits and removals. It is generally advisable to perform spot QC checks of your mass redactions results and run test mass redactions edits or deletions in limited sets of documents to ensure they are being applied as expected. You can always undo your test redactions as noted further down in this article.
This feature is in Crawl.
How to mass redact documents: edits and removals.
- On the Search & Review page, identify a set of documents that you want to update redactions for. Select those documents.
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Once you've selected your documents, click on the "redact" button in the mass actions options above the document list.
- Now click 'Update existing redactions' and the 'Update existing' side sheet will appear. Note that just like applying new mass redactions, your updates will only be applied to the selected documents. In this example, 15,384 documents will be included in this mass redactions update.
- In the "Redaction reason" dropdown, select the redaction reason for the set of redactions that you would like to update. You may select a specific redaction reason, all redaction reasons, redactions with any reason, or redactions with no reason.
- In the "Desired update" dropdown, select whether you would like to update or delete the specified redactions.
- If editing redactions, you will have the option to edit the redaction reason and/or the redaction color.
- In the "New redaction reason" dropdown, you can create a new redaction reason. Begin typing in the redaction reason and click "Create".
- In the "Color" dropdown, you can select a color to apply to the specified redactions or select "No change".
- To add additional updates, click on "Add another". A new row will appear.
- In this example, we'll delete all redactions without a reason.
- As you continue to add rows you'll notice that this will impact the reasons you can select going forwards:
- In this case, we can't select "All redactions", "Redactions with any reason" or "Redactions with no reason" as in the above example we have already made changes impacting these types of redactions.
- You can also remove the redaction reason without replacing it with another:
- Once you are satisfied with your changes, the next step is to specify what types of redactions you want to edit or remove:
- Manual -> redactions that were added by a human reviewer, they drew a redactions box.
- Mass -> redactions that were added by our mass redactions system,
- You can target mass, manual or both at your discretion
- The next step is to specify where to run your edit operations over:
- You can specify to adjust redactions contained within the document itself as well as to restrict it to metadata redactions
- Once you are satisfied with your update job, click 'Apply' to kick off the mass action. You will see a confirmation model. Click "Confirm udpates":
- The in app notification system will alert you that your job has started:
- You can keep track of how your job is going in the Mass Action Log (MAL)
- Click on the '82 Documents' to see your changes as consolidated job
- Open up a document to inspect it's audit history:
- You can always roll back your changes to restore things back to the way they were:
- Your rollback operation commences:
Mass Redactions Edits and Removals FAQ
Q: Do mass redactions edits and removals involve extra costs?
A: Mass redactions are offered to DISCO Ediscovery customers without additional cost.
Q: What data spaces are mass redactions edits and removals available in?
A: Mass redactions edits and removals are available in active review.
Q: Are mass redactions edits and removals permissible?
A: Yes, review managers can change permissions for custom roles, users who can add mass redactions will also have permissions for this feature.
Q: Can I initiate multiple mass redactions edits and removals jobs or do I need to wait for each one to finish?
A: Yes you can initiate multiple jobs.
Q: What documents are eligible for this feature?
A: All text based documents can have mass redaction edits and removals applied to them.
Q: What happens if I change redactions on a document after doing a mass redactions edit job?
A: Documents that have been reprocessed, modified or updated in certain ways after a mass removals/edits action cannot (no) be rolled back. When a rollback is initiated from the mass action log we will skip over these impacted documents. We do not link to these documents.
Q: What does reprocessing mean?
A: Can include actions such as overlaying text, re-imaging or updating document metadata. If any of the documents affected by the mass removal/edit have been reprocessed after the action, the rollback will not restore redactions for those documents. Reprocessing can alter the document's structure or content, making it impossible to accurately restore the previous redactions.
Q: What does modified mean?
A: Modified documents are those that have had changes made to them after the batch removal/edit. This can include → Applying new redactions or annotations, or even editing existing redactions. Doing anything like this means the document will no longer be able to have redactions edits rolled back from the mass actions log. The rollback operation will not affect that document. Subsequent modifications may conflict with the state of the document at the time of the deletion, so we prevent undoing to avoid overwriting newer changes.
Q: What best practices do you recommend here?
A: User Responsibility: Users should be cautious when performing batch deletions and be aware of the limitations in undoing the action. If there's a possibility that redactions may need to be restored, avoid modifying or reprocessing affected documents until the decision is final.
Best Practices:
- Double-check the selection criteria and documents before initiating the removal/edit operation in the first place.
- Inform team members about the batch deletion to prevent unintended modifications that could hinder the undo process.
- You should *always* perform rollbacks promptly before any affected documents are modified or reprocessed. This is really important to note.
Q: Are redactions edits and deletions linked together in one job? Can I set off a series of cascading update events based on the order of rows I specify? For example -> "If I removed the reason 'Attorney-client' and next row said delete all redactions without a reason ... then what?"
A: No. We do not 'chain the redactions but take a 'snap shot' of each document and simultaneously assess it to determine edits/removals to apply. We do not sequentially apply the edits so that one row may have downstream consequences on the following row.
Q: I still have questions that aren't answered here, can you help me?
A: Absolutely, we are with you in every case. Contact your customer service advisor and we'll directly connect with our product management team. They love to answer your emails and are always happy to jump on a quick video call with you!