![]() When the affidavit was copied and pasted into another application’s text file for uploading, however, the black redaction boxes vanished, revealing all the private financial information that was supposed to be hidden. The PDF file contained about 100 pages of financial transactions that were blacked out in the PDF file. More recently, reporting about an SEC settlement with alleged fraudsters, a reporter for this publication downloaded from the federal PACER database an affidavit from one of the defendants in the matter. In 2014, The New York Times reportedly failed to properly redact a PDF file of leaked National Security Administration documents and inadvertently released the name of an NSA agent. “But the method used to post the report on the district’s website made it possible for anyone to read the blacked-out portions by copying and pasting them into another file.” ![]() “By court order, the district was supposed to black out nearly two-thirds of the report because it disclosed information that Cruz was entitled to keep private under federal and state law,” the newspaper reported. Redaction errors exposing confidential information are coming to light with increasing frequency: Earlier this year, The South Florida Sun-Sentinel unveiled what was supposed to have been confidential information in a school district report about Parkland, Florida, high school shooter Nikolas Cruz, which raised the ire of a local judge. Aside from risking potential civil liability, lawyers also could face disciplinary action when they fail to properly redact court documents, as evidenced by a 2013 case involving a Chicago lawyer and a 2014 case out of Kentucky. The damages could be in the hundreds of millions of dollars,” said Eric Bland, a legal malpractice attorney at Bland Richter in Columbia, South Carolina. And the exposure for an attorney in that situation is monumental. When they transfer it to us, we have a duty to maintain that information. “A client’s information is their property. Lawyers who fail to properly redact information in confidential documents could run afoul of the American Bar Association’s rule on safeguarding client property, which has been adopted by most states. ![]() ![]() But sometimes that curtain is surprisingly easy to raise.Īnd when that happens, it can mean trouble for attorneys and their clients. It’s supposed to be an impenetrable curtain. The black redaction box is meant to protect sensitive information from public view. ![]()
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