Redaction Software for a Small Law Firm: Scanned Records, SSNs and Account Numbers

A records packet arrives as a scanned PDF a few hundred pages long: medical records, bank statements, the other side’s production. Before any of it goes to opposing counsel, an expert or the court, your client’s name, Social Security number and account numbers have to come out.

A large firm hands that job to a litigation support team. A small firm hands it to an associate or a paralegal, usually whoever has the afternoon free, and it takes most of the afternoon. It’s simple work, but slow, and by page three hundred a tired reader can miss the one account number that mattered.

Lex Cloak does this job, and it’s my product, so I’ll start with what I’d look for in any software for it, then walk through how it goes in Lex Cloak. Whether it does the job well is for you to judge.

Why it takes an afternoon

• A scanned page is a picture. Search can’t find a Social Security number in a picture of one, so somebody reads the page.
• Your client turns up in many forms. Maya Tinderwick on the intake form, TINDERWICK, MAYA on the bank statement, M. Tinderwick in a letter and Ms. Tinderwick in the notes. Her account number appears in full on one page and as the last four digits on the next.
• Scans come in messy. Faxed pages sit crooked, tables break across pages, and someone has usually written in the margin.
• Numbers look alike. A nine-digit number can be a Social Security number, an account number or a claim number, and the reader decides which, page after page.

What the software you already have can do

If the firm pays for Adobe Acrobat Pro, it covers a lot of this. It can run OCR (optical character recognition, which turns a picture of text back into text) on a scan, and its Find text and redact tool searches for words or patterns such as Social Security numbers. On the Pro and Studio plans, its AI Assistant can find sensitive text by meaning when you ask it to, though that path needs the machine online. You start each step yourself: recognize the text, search, walk the matches, apply. For a handful of documents a month, that’s a sound way to work.

You’d want more once the flow is steady: a production every week, records that arrive as scans, a client whose name appears a dozen different ways.

What to look for

• It reads scanned pages without a separate OCR step.
• It finds names as well as numbers. Numbers follow patterns and names don’t, yet a name is usually the detail that identifies your client.
• You can tell it who your client is. You type the name, date of birth and account numbers once, and the software looks for the forms they turn up in.
• You approve each match before anything comes out.
• It removes the text instead of covering it, then checks the saved PDF. A black box drawn over text leaves the words in the file, and that mistake keeps turning up in court filings.
• It handles a stack of files at once.
• The records stay on your computer while you work on them.
• You can see the price. You check it on the website and decide without booking a sales call.

How it goes in Lex Cloak

1. Open the PDF. Drag in the scanned production, or several at once.
2. Pick the Legal profile. It gives you one choice: a working copy, where the identifiers come out whole, or a public federal court filing, where Lex Cloak keeps what the federal rule allows, such as the last four digits of an account number and the year of a birth date.
3. On a big production, choose the pages first. Lex Cloak can show you the pages before it scans, so you drop the ones that don’t matter and scan the rest.
4. Tell it who the file is about. Under Who this document is about, you type your client’s name, date of birth and account numbers once. Lex Cloak looks for them in the forms they realistically take, and it keeps looking for everyone you haven’t named.
5. Let it scan. Lex Cloak reads each page on your computer, scanned ones included, and lists what it found by type: names, Social Security numbers, account numbers, card numbers, addresses and dates of birth.
6. Go through the list. Turn off anything that should stay. Put the court’s name on Never Redact so Lex Cloak leaves it alone, and a recurring account number on Always Redact so it comes out of the next file too.
7. Preview, then save. Before you download, a short checklist names the pages that need your eyes, such as handwriting Lex Cloak couldn’t read. Then Lex Cloak reads the redacted PDF back, and if it can still find text you marked, it stops and names the page. Several files save together as a ZIP, and if one of them needs a look, Lex Cloak names the file and the page.

What it won’t do

It won’t catch everything. Poor scans and unusual layouts cause misses, which is why you approve the list and look at the pages the checklist names. Lex Cloak can tell when a page carries handwriting but can’t read it, so you draw a box over anything sensitive there. Its signature check does its best, and you look at those pages too.

Where the files go

The PDFs stay on your computer. Lex Cloak reads, redacts and saves them there, with no upload, so the records don’t leave the firm while you work on them. The app does go online for a few small things, like checking for updates and renewing its license, and none of them carries anything from your documents.

Other redaction software works in other ways. Some upload the PDF to a server, and some run in a browser tab. I compared those approaches, and what each one asks you to trust, in How to Redact a PDF Without Uploading It Anywhere.

What it costs

Scanning is free, and so are your first three documents. After that it’s $35 a month or $350 a year. It runs on Windows and on Macs with Apple silicon.

Best to try it on the worst file in the office, the faxed production with handwriting in the margins. You’ll see what Lex Cloak finds, and what it misses, before you pay anything.