Redacting court filings: what Rule 5.2 requires, and how filings leak anyway

In federal civil practice the duty to redact sits on the filer and on counsel, not on the clerk. Rule 5.2 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure sets the floor, and the floor is narrower than most people remember.

What Rule 5.2 requires

• Social security numbers and taxpayer identification numbers: only the last four digits.
• Dates of birth: only the year.
• Names of individuals known to be minors: initials only.
• Financial account numbers: only the last four digits.

The rule also allows a party to file an unredacted copy under seal alongside the redacted public version. That pairing is where most accidents happen: two documents with almost identical contents, one of which must never be published, moving through the same workflow on the same afternoon.

How filings leak

On 8 January 2019, a filing on behalf of Paul Manafort reached the public docket with passages blacked out. The black bars were drawn over live text; reporters copied the passages straight out, and a corrected version of the same filing had to be entered on the docket before the day was over. Nothing about that filing looked wrong on screen.

Word-processor highlighting has the same problem, and so do PDF annotation tools: both survive conversion as a shape on top of text that is still there. Flattening the file does not reliably help either — it depends on the tool and on the layer.

A pre-filing checklist

1. Apply true redaction: the text has to be removed from the file, not covered.
2. Strip document and XMP metadata, which often still carries the client name or the original file name.
3. Re-extract the text of the FINAL PDF and search it for every string you redacted.
4. Search the metadata of the final PDF for the same strings.
5. Review the document visually, page by page, including scanned exhibits.
6. Keep a record of the check you ran, with the date and a fingerprint of the file you filed.

This page is general information about a procedural rule, not legal advice, and no tool can decide what you were required to redact. TachadoPDF performs and verifies the removal; the judgement about what must come out remains yours.