After months of listening, developing, testing, and tweaking, we’re excited to announce the next release of our automated redaction tool for Relativity, Blackout 1.3! Blackout has already demonstrated that it can provide huge savings in both time and money – reducing manual redaction costs by about 50% and turnaround time by over 90% – so we can’t wait to see how the new and improved Blackout will continue to surpass expectations.
In Blackout 1.2, we added highlighting, made it easier to organize similar rules into rule groups, allowed users to define a specific markup scope, and developed a way to easily resolve mismatches between extracted text and OCR right within the document viewer. Since then we’ve continued to gather intel on the user experience, and we’ve added a couple of significant new features that have been in high demand.
Here are the brand new features added in Blackout 1.3:
Import Rules: Gone are the days when Lit Support teams have to spend their time manually typing all of their redaction or highlighting rules into Blackout one at a time, because Blackout 1.3 now supports importing a CSV file with all of your redaction or highlighting rules at once. As any Case Manager knows, redaction can be a complex process, so this new feature will be a game-changer in endless different scenarios, for example:
Corporation A is involved in a class-action lawsuit and needs to disclose hundreds of relevant account statements and communications with account holders. Their law firm or service provider needs to redact any customer PII, but still needs to tie communications to account numbers, so they can’t just redact customer names with the markup text “NAME.” If the service provider does not have Blackout, their reviewers will need to go through and manually redact each of those hundreds of names and replace each name with the appropriate customer account number. If they have Blackout, they can create a CSV file using Blackout’s CSV Import Template that lists the customers’ names as the text to redact and the corresponding account number as the markup text. They can now upload the CSV file when they set up their Blackout job and it will use those rules to find the names and apply text redactions with their account numbers!
Capture Groups: In earlier versions of Blackout, if you wanted to redact, say, PII like a person’s date of birth, you could create a Blackout rule that would identify the common date pattern of “xx/xx/xxxx,” but you’d likely end up redacting other dates that are important to the case. You could also set up a Blackout rule to redact any line with the phrase “DOB,” but it’s going to redact both the date and the label “DOB,” which you need for context. Blackout 1.3 now features Regular Expression Capture Groups, which allow users to define text or a pattern to be redacted, then redact only specific parts of the text or pattern. Using Regular Expression Capture Groups, you can create a rule to find and redact anything following the label “DOB,” so the date of birth will be redacted, but you still have the label to identify what has been redacted. You can choose to redact only the necessary data from your matched regular expression and leave the rest unredacted, allowing you to do more complex and targeted matching without having to worry about over-redacting.
Learn more about the full functionality of Blackout at milyli.com/blackout, or contact sales@milyli.com to set up a demo. Current Blackout customers, contact support@milyli.com to schedule your upgrade now.