At the start of 2020, North Dakota Courts had an admirable goal. They were going to make all court records available through the internet to their citizens. With the pandemic coming into full swing, this would allow citizens to view court records without having to physically come into an office, giving greater transparency and flexibility to citizens while at the same time reducing walkup traffic for court employees.
This access only lasted until January 7th of the same year as news outlets were reporting that millions of the available documents contained personally identifiable information like social security numbers, birthdates, and credit card information.
After meeting several times throughout the last year, it appears the favored choice is to go back to allowing citizens to view records on a computer terminal in a court office or to make an email request to receive specific documents.
What makes North Dakota unique isn’t its volume (although 27 million pages to redact in a year does sound daunting), but that the clerks aren’t even allowed to redact information. In North Dakota, the responsibility is on the filer of documents to redact information ahead of time, or to request redactions where they see issues.
The struggle to bring millions of records online, whether for courts, land records, or others, is something we see frequently at Extract. With limited staff availability to catch up on what is sometimes over 100 years of documents, it can seem like an impossible task to remove all of the personally identifiable information scattered throughout them. The quality of the scans often leaves much to be desired, and it’s all but a guarantee that information needing to be redacted won’t be in the same place in each document.
Fortunately, Extract offers an automation software that reads documents like a human would in a fraction of the time. We use optical character recognition to read all of the text in a document and identify any personally identifiable information. From there, the software can permanently redact those items on its own or you can have a verifier quickly confirm the redactions before finalizing.
If you’d like to learn more about how our software can help with this process, please reach out.
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.