Redact PDF Legal Discovery — Free in Your Browser

Legal discovery redaction requires accuracy, consistency, and a record of why material was withheld. PDFs may contain privilege, work product, trade secrets, PII, medical details, and third-party data, so a local redaction workflow should be paired with attorney review, Bates tracking, and final verification before production.

HidePDF runs entirely in your browser, which matters for producing a meet-and-confer redacted set. Your PDF never uploads to our servers; processing happens in local memory on your device. Local redaction on paralegal machines preserves chain-of-custody better than unknown SaaS storage.

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Guide: Redact PDF Legal Discovery

Legal discovery redaction requires accuracy, consistency, and a record of why material was withheld. PDFs may contain privilege, work product, trade secrets, PII, medical details, and third-party data, so a local redaction workflow should be paired with attorney review, Bates tracking, and final verification before production.

Discovery PDFs cannot be casually uploaded to consumer sites opposing counsel might subpoena. Local redaction on paralegal machines preserves chain-of-custody better than unknown SaaS storage.

Log Bates ranges alongside redacted sets. Color photo exhibits: HideShot for faces/license plates; MetadataWipe on camera metadata from investigative JPEGs.

Production copies versus privilege-log descriptions

Discovery has at least two different PDFs, and they are not interchangeable. A production copy is what the other side receives: Bates-stamped pages with privileged or otherwise withheld passages covered so those passages cannot be searched or copied out of the file. A privilege log is a separate description of what was withheld or covered, written so it identifies the document and the claim without quoting the privileged sentences themselves.

Putting privileged advice into the log “for completeness” undoes the covering. Producing the log as if it were the production set dumps descriptions into the wrong channel. Counsel owns the log’s wording and the call on what is privileged. The technical job on this page is making a production PDF whose covered regions do not still contain recoverable text, while Bates numbers and non-withheld content remain readable.

Productions also pick up third-party home addresses, medical lines, account numbers, and trade-secret tables that are not privilege but still should not travel in the clear. Those boxes belong on the production copy. The log, if it mentions them at all, stays at a high level. Keep originals, production exports, and logs aligned by Bates range or document ID so a later dispute can reconstruct what left the firm.

How to prepare a discovery PDF in the on-page tool

Load a working copy of the production PDF—not the only original—in the discovery redaction tool on this page. Work on counsel’s or the paralegal’s machine. The file stays in this browser, which is the point when a meet-and-confer set should not be copied onto a consumer PDF host that another party could later try to reach.

1. Confirm the Bates range on screen matches the range on the privilege log and the production index.
2. Box privileged sentences, work-product notes, and other withheld strings counsel marked. Leave Bates stamps visible unless counsel says otherwise. Cover third-party identifiers and account digits that the protocol says to withhold.
3. Export a new PDF. Do not overwrite the unredacted original.
4. Open the export in a viewer that was not used to draw boxes. Search privileged names, “advice” phrases counsel flagged, and account fragments. Copy across a black region. A hit means that page is not production-ready.

Email headers, comment remnants from a Word-to-PDF conversion, and exhibit labels can carry the same privileged string the body already covered. Photo exhibits may need image covering; camera originals may still hold capture metadata. This tool only flattens the PDF boxes you draw.

Three discovery stages that need different exports

A rolling production to opposing counsel should be a dedicated export from the reviewed set. Reusing a “nearly done” file that still has uncovered comment bubbles is how work product lands in the other side’s review platform.

A meet-and-confer excerpt is often a handful of pages, not the whole custodian. Cover only what that conversation requires, on a copy labeled as an excerpt, so you do not accidentally produce neighboring privileged pages that were sitting in the same native PDF.

An appellate or public-filing set is not the same as a confidential discovery production. Courts and later stages can have different public-access rules. Do not assume the boxes you burned for a protective-order production are sufficient for a docketed brief. Counsel decides; you export a separate file for that stage.

Production mistakes that opposing counsel can exploit

Overlay tools and highlighter markup look black in your viewer and still yield text in theirs. Discovery vendors and opposing review platforms will search. Verify in a second viewer before the load file goes out.

Misaligning Bates numbers with the privilege log makes a covering undebatable in the worst way: you cannot show what was withheld on which page. Keep the log, the original, and the production export in lockstep.

Emailing the unredacted original to a personal webmail account “to finish boxes at home” creates a copy outside the firm’s custody story. Finish covering on the machine the matter already uses. HidePDF is a local covering tool, not a document-review platform, not a Bates engine, and not a substitute for attorney review.

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Frequently asked questions