In the digital age, courts should be more accepting of redactions to protect irrelevant information from production in civil discovery. Redacting irrelevant personal and commercial information poses little risk or prejudice to requesting parties and provides tangible benefits to producing parties who need to protect the privacy of their employees and customers, and the value of their commercial information. Historically, courts have permitted redactions of non-privileged material only in exceptional circumstances and generally limited them to privileged communications in otherwise responsive and non-privileged documents. Given heightened privacy and cybersecurity concerns, this culture must change.
In cases with personal information, data protected by data protection laws, or with documents that contain irrelevant sensitive commercial information permitting redactions should be the rule, not the exception.
