North Dakota has recently barred access to over a decade’s worth of court documents due to privacy concerns. The documents, which went live online at the beginning of the year, drew concerns from the public over pieces of personally identifiable information that were available within them.
A rule has been in place since March of 2009 that required Social Security numbers, birth dates, and more to be redacted from court documents, but the responsibility for doing so lies with the filer, not the court.
The idea of granting remote access to these documents makes sense as having to physically travel to courthouses to view files can be quite burdensome. The Supreme Court is, however, trying to make the process of getting the documents redacted as easy as possible. Rather than needing to go through the court system filing motions and obtaining a court order, an online form will be available to instruct clerks to add redactions to data in the filings that should have been redacted initially.
While the court will attempt to bring documents that are compliant with privacy laws back online, it can be difficult to evaluate large swaths of files as they currently don’t have searchable data fields.
The courts believe that more than anything, this is a process problem. Redaction requirements have been in place since 2009, but filers weren’t specifically forced to comply with them before submitting their documents. Moving to a system that would ensure filers are complying with redaction standards would alleviate privacy concerns for any of these documents going forward.
At Extract, we frequently work with state and local courts to get their backfile or day-forward documents ready for the limelight of online records access. We believe that this is a process that should be automated, not only for the time savings that can be achieved, but to improve accuracy as well. We’ve worked with the National Center for State Courts to prove the efficacy of automated court redaction.
Our redaction software, ID Shield, is well suited for redacting things like minor names and financial account numbers because it’s designed to work with unstructured documents. So rather than looking to a specific location in a file for sensitive information, we use optical character recognition to understand the entirety of the file, identifying clues within the text that either indicate where PII is, or that the text itself is PII.
Click below to see how we helped Fairfax County, Virginia get their court documents ready for remote access, or just let us know if you have any questions we can answer.
About the Author: Chris Mack
Chris is a Marketing Manager at Extract with experience in product development, data analysis, and both traditional and digital marketing. Chris received his bachelor’s degree in English from Bucknell University and has an MBA from the University of Notre Dame. A passionate marketer, Chris strives to make complex ideas more accessible to those around him in a compelling way.