Seven Benefits of Pre-Redacting and Pre-Highlighting

Here are seven benefits achieved by pre-redacting and pre-highlighting with Blackout, Milyli's award-winning redaction software.

Pre-highlighting and pre-redacting are preparatory steps used to improve the accuracy, inclusiveness, and appropriateness of markups. By flagging the most common formats of sensitive information in advance, reviewers are less likely to miss sensitive information and more easily consider contextual variation when determining how documents should be marked up.

For example, did the project catch every variation in Social Security Number across hundreds of pages? Were all the different formats of birth dates appropriately marked? Or does the sensitive information marked up comply stylistically with case requirements?

A mix of redactions and highlights placed with Blackout.

Now, here are the benefits document reviewers can expect when pre-highlighting and pre-redacting with Blackout.

1. Boosted Focus on Quality 

Review work is complex and requires diligence, attention, and focus. The last thing you want is mental fatigue hitting your reviewers in the middle of a critical case. By pre-highlighting or pre-redacting with the clear rules and expectations set out for the production, reviewers can focus on skimming documents for outlier occurrences of sensitive information.

2. Reduced Likelihood of Missing Sensitive Info 

Given the enormous number of documents included in today's Relativity matters, it's often improbable, if not impossible, to accurately manually redact that much data. Automated pre-redaction or highlighting will ensure that massive volumes of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) are handled correctly and on time.

When reviewers prioritize scanning or searching for nuanced terms rather than spending their energy looking for every instance of PII, they minimize the risk of errors that can ruin an organization's reputation and be extremely costly.

3. Saved Time 

Pre-redacting quickly eliminates the most common or standardized formats of sensitive information that need marking up – like email addresses and credit card numbers. Pre-highlighting is excellent for a contextual pass on documents as it draws reviewers' attention to areas of interest in their documents where PII might exist but may not need to be redacted, depending on what is deemed private in the matter. This allows reviewers to avoid excessive scanning for the same sensitive info in each format it appears, one by one, page by page, hour after hour.

4. Better Project Collaboration and Scalability

Pre-redaction and pre-highlighting enhance collaboration for teams handling large document sets. Work that is difficult for any individual to manage independently, even for subject matter experts, scales effortlessly for multi-reviewer teams. With pre-highlighting and pre-redacting, every reviewer can more quickly familiarize themselves with how the finished work product should look.

5. Improved End-to-End Review Efficiency 

Cutting some of the most rote and repetitive processes during review with pre-highlighting and pre-redaction means reviewers can prioritize more important thought work. Automating portions of a workflow also ensures markup tasks are performed the same way, every time, by every reviewer.

Blackout helps eliminate the various points of lag and churn during setup and early review. This means improved efficiency for the entire review team – even those jumping in to help mid-review!

6. Create Reusable Work Product

Another benefit of pre-highlighting and pre-redacting is creating secure, reusable work product. That includes dtSearches, saved searches, and rulesets that are useful for similar documents or matters for the same client. This also makes it easier to spot where a workflow should change and how to repeat the processes that work best in ongoing matters.

7. Reduced Costs, Not Billable Hours

As stated in our Superior Support blog: "It might seem counterintuitive to encourage eDiscovery professionals to spend less time with your tools – but it's not if it's showing them how to get better results faster so they can return their focus to the 'bigger fish' they have to fry."

These benefits mean less time spent on manual review processes overall. That does not mean manual tasks are eliminated entirely—we know they're essential to your workflows.

However, projects that include pre-redacting and pre-highlighting with Blackout automate away the work reviewers shouldn't waste their time doing, and that means more wins in the fight to make eDiscovery a little easier.

RSVP to our upcoming webinar, where we'll demonstrate pre-redacting and pre-highlighting with Blackout. ➜

Or if you'd like to get started with Blackout, go here. ➜