Ride the Lightning

Jones Day Screws Up Redaction and Bob Ambrogi Has a Field Day

September 30, 2019

The title wrote itself because Bob's post about the Jones Day redaction screw-up was as hilarious as any of the original articles were sobering (there were many but you can all get to this post from the ABA Journal – many of the other stories are behind a paywall).

As the ABA reported, a federal court document filed by Jones Day and local counsel Gentry Locke contained many redactions to protect grand jury information in a criminal case against their pharmaceutical client.

However (stop me if you've heard this story before), the redactions could be read by cutting and pasting the blacked-out sections into a new document. That led U.S. Magistrate Judge Pamela Meade Sargent to order the law firms on September 11^th to show cause why they shouldn't be sanctioned for the error.

The faulty redactions described grand jury testimony and said four grand juries had heard testimony from 79 witnesses before returning an indictment against the pharmaceutical client.

As Bob noted, "After a reporter discovered the error and a magistrate-judge asked the firm to explain itself, Jones Day responded with a letter to the court filed in Support of Defendants' Motion to Dismiss that is a masterpiece in the use of lawyerspeak for defensive obfuscation — even attempting to shift blame to the reporter who discovered the error by accusing him of 'exploiting a technical weakness.'"

What Bob did (still chuckling) was translate the godawful Jones Day letter from lawyerspeak to plain English with his own annotations in italics. You owe it to yourself to take a break and read it.

All the reporter did (he didn't defeat a proper redaction process!) was copy and paste the redacted information into a new document. Doh. A time-honored attempt by anyone who wants to read a redacted document. The poor redaction process and inadequate review are eminently clear. Of course Jones Day filed a new, properly redacted document. Sure they are going to train the lawyers who work on the case about proper redaction. Proper redaction does not involve converting a Word Document into a PDF and blacking out text without use of redaction software. Good grief.

Jones Day did note to the court that the redaction process was entirely the responsibility of Jones Day and not Gentry Locke, which filed the document as local counsel. A small grace note in the face of an unsupportable error. What ever happened to the ethical duty of being competent with technology?

Still, this will all make for great CLE material – and the audiences will howl at Bob's annotations, so I guess I have nothing to complain about. More to come? Of course.

HT to Dave Ries, who made sure to get me this story while I was on vacation and to Bob Ambrogi for making me laugh out loud so many times.

Sharon D. Nelson, Esq., President, Sensei Enterprises, Inc.
3975 University Drive, Suite 225|Fairfax, VA 22030
Email: Phone: 703-359-0700
Digital Forensics/Cybersecurity/Information Technology
https://senseient.com
https://twitter.com/sharonnelsonesq
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sharondnelson
https://amazon.com/author/sharonnelson