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Find PII Better Than a Private Eye Finds People with Blackout

  • Writer: Micah W.
    Micah W.
  • 2 hours ago
  • 2 min read

Personally identifiable information (PII) often hides in plain sight, and even for the best reviewers, it can be hard to find and easy to miss when redacting.


It’s sprinkled throughout long email threads. It’s peppered into spreadsheets. It even appears with varied context – irrelevant in one document, but highly sensitive in another.


In our recent customer-first webinar, Blackout for Relativity: Find PII Better Than a Private Eye Finds People, we shared practical ways to identify, scope, and redact PII more efficiently and effectively.


We showcased the combined benefits of:


Below is a recap of how we suggest putting them to work.


1. Catch What the Eye Misses with Blackout's Find & Redact


Manual review alone makes it easy to overlook repeated or patterned data considered PII. This is where Blackout's Find & Redact becomes a force multiplier for users tasked with a review.


Find & Redact allows:

  • Manually typed rules to instantly locate repeated references to a client

  • Preconfigure rules for email addresses to surface outlier formats

  • Sampling and toggling redactions to ensure over-redacting is avoided

     

We also demonstrated how to appropriately expand a narrowly written rule to more effectively flag PII, and how a simple configuration update to Blackout can preload default terms.


2. Scope and Forecast PII Volume Accurately Before Starting 


Before launching a full review, it’s critical to understand what PII your team will encounter.


Instead of guessing how much sensitive data exists, Blackout Analyze allows reviewers to scan the extracted text of a document against targeted rules and term lists. They can then leverage a saved search to gain a deeper understanding of what PII and other terms would appear in the review.


With Blackout Analyze, teams can: 

  • Estimate workload by identifying the volume of PII in docs

  • Better understand how an automated project may perform on docs 

  • Identify which PII types or other terms appear most frequently 

 

Blackout Analyze is also safe to run early and often because it is nondestructive – that is, no redactions are placed, and the documents are not altered.


3: Scale Appropriately with Automated Redaction Projects 


Some document sets are too large or too dynamic for manual workflows alone. After scoping the data with Analyze, running Blackout's automated redaction projects across the same saved searches will further speed up the review process.


These projects are especially useful for images, PDFs, spreadsheets, and other formats where Find & Redact or Redaction Suggestions may not be practical at scale. The key advantage it provides is consistency: once rules are validated during scoping, they can be reused confidently across projects.


Make It Simpler From Discovery to Delivery


PII workflows don’t have to start with guesswork or end with reviewer burnout. 


Instead, combine: 

  • Targeted Find & Redact searches 

  • Redaction Suggestions 

  • Early analysis for scoping and forecasting using Blackout Analyze  

  • Automated Blackout projects at scale 

 

Watch the full webinar to see all these recommendations in action – and move from discovery to delivery with greater accuracy, stronger consistency, and fewer surprises.



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