San Diego Bankruptcy:  How We Redact Confidential Client Information From Court Submitted Documents

We are required by the United States Bankruptcy Code, Bankruptcy Rules, Local Bankruptcy Rules, and the Local United States Trustee Bankruptcy Guidelines (San Diego) to publicly file various client documents. We are also required to redact confidential information. Specifically, we must redact: Social Security or taxpayer-identification numbers; dates of birth; names of minor children; and financial account numbers, in compliance with Fed. R. Bankr. P. 9037. This requirement applies to all documents, including attachments.” We have found it useful to follow the guidance found in NASA instructions for redacting confidential information from electronic documents (link below).

With the amount of required supporting documents growing in a bankruptcy proceeding, along with the difficulty of passing the labor intensive costs along to our consumer bankruptcy clients, electronic redaction can be a means for helping reduce the cost burden. It can also reduce the risk of an inadvertent disclosure of information. In some cases however it will still be necessary to manually redact documents that don’t lend themselves to automated procedures.