In January, Paul Manafort’s lawyers made headlines for failing to take proper steps to redact a document. Myriad outlets covered the story, including The Atlantic, BBC, and Legal Tech News.
In response, the ABA Journal posted How to redact a PDF and protect your clients. A few days later, I recommended the ABA post in my blog Competence, Confidences and PDFs.
Today, the ABA Journal published more helpful information: Redacting confidential client information: The devil is in the details. The post points out the risks in failing to understand how property to redact a document. I recommend it.
One risk? Disciplinary action. Lawyers have a duty not to disclose information relating to the representation of a client. There’s also a duty to use reasonable safeguards to protect against unauthorized access to or inadvertent disclosure of confidential information. In my view, employing a redaction method that fails to keep information confidential is not a reasonable safeguard.
Rather, it’s tech incompetence.
Ethical Grounds 
And I thought there would be unredacted text in the example with a secret message for all loyal readers of the blog.
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Great idea! Alas, I’m not that clever.
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