Kroll Ontrack has announced enhancements to its Relativity product to allow an automated approach to applying redactions to sensitive documents in ediscovery. The company claims it will simplify the manual redaction process and reduce the risk of inadvertent disclosure.

Its ‘”assisted-redaction” technology identifies and redacts Personally Identifiable Information (PII), privileged or other pertinent information based on user-defined criteria,

“Combing through data for sensitive or privileged information is a critical, yet arduous and time-consuming component of legal review,” said John Grancarich, vice president of product management, Kroll Ontrack.

“In addition, inadvertent disclosure can trigger a wave of expensive and distracting challenges for both parties. The assisted-redaction application featured in Kroll Ontrack’s Relativity offering allows counsel to quickly identify, verify and apply user-defined redactions, while still offering our users full control to review, approve or reject each applied redaction.”

Assisted-redaction technology additionally addresses the manual nature of the redaction process by cascading search terms and regular expressions across the entire data collection workspace or a subset of data.

The application leverages user-defined criteria to identify sensitive information and automatically place redactions on qualified documents. Reviewers quality check redactions right within the Relativity viewer, making verification simple and extremely efficient.

“It’s not uncommon during early case assessment and even during review to identify numerous terms or entire lines or paragraphs of privileged text that occur many times in a collection of documents and email threads,” said Wendy King, product director, Kroll Ontrack.

“Assisted redaction is ideal in that it takes those terms, lines or paragraphs and applies them across the entirety of the identified data collection, saving a significant amount of time and resources. All proposed redactions are approved or rejected by counsel based on reviewer input and case criteria.”

Kroll Ontrack experts can help define and refine redaction terms and expressions based on the specifics of the case:

Names, phrases, and terms: Easily redact all references to proper names, phrases, and single words, for example “Joe Bloggs” or “Product XYZ” or “Canberra, ACT”

Social security, credit card, bank account and phone numbers: Locate any alpha-numeric, patterned sequence and redact using regular expression searching, for example all occurrences of “XXX-XX-XXXX” or “(XXX) XXX-XXXX”

Email addresses and dates of birth: Identify all email addresses and specific dates, formatted in any manner

For more information about assisted redaction within Kroll Ontrack’s Relativity offering, visit: http://www.ediscovery.com/solutions/relativity/.