Redact Legal Documents & Court Filings — Rule-Compliant Redaction
Redact court filings, contracts and discovery documents correctly: SSNs, account numbers, minors' names, DOBs. True redaction in your browser, no upload.
Drop a PDF here or click to upload
Files stay on your device. Max 50 MB.
Why this needs true redaction
Legal documents are redaction-critical twice over. First, the rules: US federal courts require filers to limit personal identifiers — only the last four digits of SSNs and financial account numbers, only the year of birth, only minors' initials (Rule 5.2; state courts have similar rules). Second, the stakes: filings become public records, and the Manafort case showed the world that a black rectangle in the wrong tool is a press leak, not a redaction.
Discovery productions add another dimension: documents produced to opposing counsel must have privileged or irrelevant personal content removed in a way that survives scrutiny — opposing experts will run text extraction on your production.
Because this tool processes everything locally, confidential client material is never transmitted to a third-party server during redaction — a property that matters under professional-responsibility duties. As always: redaction removes, it never alters. Changing substantive content in a legal document is a far more serious matter than failing to redact.
Step by step
- 1
Drop the filing or exhibit PDF
Opens locally — confidential material never leaves your device.
- 2
Run pattern searches
Enable the SSN and card presets and click 'Find matches'. Then search exact terms: DOBs, minor's names, account numbers.
- 3
Apply the rule of partial redaction
Where rules allow last-four digits, draw a rectangle over only the first digits, leaving the last four visible.
- 4
Cover scans and signatures manually
Exhibits, stamps and wet signatures have no text layer — draw rectangles over them.
- 5
Apply, verify, download
Content is deleted and the document rebuilt; the tool re-searches the output and shows 'Verified: 0 matches remain'.
Checklist: what to redact, what to keep
Redact this
- SSNs and taxpayer IDs — all but the last four digits (Rule 5.2)
- Financial account numbers — all but the last four digits
- Dates of birth — leave only the year
- Names of minors — replace with initials
- Home addresses in protective-order and domestic cases
- Privileged or confidential third-party content in discovery productions
Keep this visible
- Last four digits where the rules permit them
- Case captions, docket numbers and party names (adults)
- Everything the court or opposing counsel is entitled to see — redact identifiers, not substance
Frequently asked questions
What exactly does Rule 5.2 require to be redacted?▼
For US federal court filings: Social Security and taxpayer IDs to the last four digits, financial account numbers to the last four digits, dates of birth to the year only, and minors' names to initials. State courts and other jurisdictions have their own variants — check your local rules before filing.
Is redacting the same as filing under seal?▼
No. Redaction removes specific identifiers from a public document. Filing under seal keeps the entire document non-public and requires a motion and court approval. When in doubt about which applies, consult the court's rules or an attorney.
Will opposing counsel be able to recover what I redacted?▼
Not from this tool's output. Content is deleted from the PDF structure, metadata and attachments are scrubbed, the file is rebuilt, and the result is automatically re-searched — the same extraction techniques an opposing expert would use.
Exhibits are scans — how do I redact those?▼
Draw manual rectangles over the sensitive areas. Redaction removes the image content under each region permanently, no text layer needed.
Does redaction hold up as 'permanent' for court purposes?▼
The removed content no longer exists in the output file — there is nothing to undo or recover. Keep the original in your own files; the redacted copy is what you produce or file.
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Guide: how to redact a PDF properly
Why black boxes fail, the attacker's checklist and the full sanitization checklist — with an interactive demo.