Job Offer: Expert Witness demostrate REDACT in Acrobat

I do this all the time, give me an idea how many documents, pages, words, and images were changed, and I can probably tell you how long it should take.

thank you for offering to help. There arwere about 30 numbers that needed to be redacted. The number of pages were about 100. About 70 documents total. Are you an expert who could testify in Court?

Hello,

http://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelejahn

I work for several Adobe Acrobat developers. I have experience testifying as an expert witness.

Here is the issue - as certain words may be found as text, but also within an image, OCR must be first applied to find all instances of the text string - and then that can be searched and redacted. Of course, you would have to then manually read the document to be certain that the redaction process was 100% - and this would take a paralegal some time to perform.

So, assuming that we need about 30 seconds maximum to read and check a single page in a document, and (assuming we are reading a checking while in Adobe Acrobat) 10 seconds to manually redact any that are missing. I would say that 70 documents at 100 pages per document (700 pages) would take 340 minutes to check properly - and even someone working fast would take 5 hours.

So - while I can indeed automatically redact a document in less than 5 minutes, I would still need to check it and sign off on that, and would assume that if I missed something, I would be liable for damages, certainly if I had changed for the service and was careless and missed something.

Please be more specific:

Is the total number of pages 100 or 7000?

Is the total number of edits 21,000, 2,100, or 30?

Is each instance the same number, or do the numbers vary? (i.e. are we changing all the x's to o's or is each o a different number, also, are all the x's different numbers). In other words can I use find and replace function or do I have to go through the entire document searching for individual known numbers to change?

I don't know what is required to be considered an "expert' in court, I have used Acrobat Pro professionally for at least 10 years for design and editing of clients projects.

Would I need to be local to testify in person or will a letter or quote estimate be sufficient?

Thank you for your responses. I apologize for late response.

What I have learned from you and others is that I am on the right track, now I need to decide how to prove my point.

The data being redacted is 30 different numbers, but should be batch redacted on mutiple documents, i.e. bank statements. Also SSN on tax filings. I have exchanged email with Rick Borstein, and he says it is possible to do what I want. We are talking about it.

I will test the operation myself to be sure it is demonstrable.
The proof reading is not a requirement for too many reason to list here, however, I can do any proof reading because the records are available to me.

One question is about how to demonstrate the operations and how to do it quickly in a court room but only to a judge. The judge may decide that the demonstration is not relevant because the attorney was under no obligation to use technology. Or the judge may say the attorney should perform in a manner that benefits the client, not the purse of the attorney. The cost of doing business such as training seems to be different for attorneys.

Oh, I just realized that you could mean "redact" in the sense of "black out" rather than the more common use of "edit". If that is the case than you could probably set up a batch process for multiple documents and walk away. That would probably take at most 30 minutes to set up. As for the batching, it would depend on the processing speed of your computer. On my computer (without testing it, I would guess) it would take 20 minutes max. So, probably under an hour, not including proofing.

BTW, You said the "the attorney used a paralegal to do it by hand". If by that you mean with a marker, or by covering the type with white or black boxes, then there could be an issue of the data being easily retrievable by someone like me.

Bill, Thanks again, By Hand, I meant the paralegal had a hard copy, and used a black marker on each piece of paper, then rescanned the marked up piece of paper and logged it into Adobe. All together 8 hours. At most, it only took me 2 hours to take each document and hand black marker it out. During the process, I had to look with my very poor vision for the numbers. I am confident the electronic method would have not missed anything. If you interested in writing a letter for me, please let me know. I have a lot on my plate and am just learning Adobe for myself. thank you for all your help so far. Mike

I tested OCR on my computer it takes 5 minutes to process 50 pages. It showed 3 image errors, which means those pages would have to be done individually.

In addition it took less than a minute to redact 10 words on 5pages.

I know there are 30 words to redact. I still am not positive if you meant there are 7000 pages or 100 pages, but you can do the math.

To demonstrate this in court quickly, you could run the app on one tenth of the number of pages and multiply by 10 to get a fairly accurate estimate I would think. If there are actually only 100 total pages then the whole thing would likely run fast enough to do the entire job in court.

Bill, Thank you again. I really appreciate your effort to help and realize the difficulty in translating my information into technically correct terminology. What you have told me so far is very helpful. The errors you got could be a problem for my arguement but I still think the manual labor to process the redacting will be significantly shorter than the "hard copy black out method".

When you get the error, how is presented to you? Does it locate the word (number) or summarize?

I agree, that a short demonstration should be sufficient for a Judge. As a back up, a statement of fact would be helpful.

FYI, I think of a page as being the same as one piece of paper. I think of a number as a word or phrase to be redacted or changed and it is unigue but contained on many pages. There are about 30 numbers. There are about 300 pages. I do not kinow how the pages or documents are stored in the attorney's computer. I assume they are easily retrieved or located because the attorney has to use them for her own evidence.

Thanks again for the continued dialogue and help. You may have guessed my personal position about attorneys. I am please that it has not gotten in the way of you helping me. I could elaberate, on a different forum.

Mike

Mike,

Well in my opinion all trial lawyers should be replaced by binding arbitration.

The error simply tells me that it can not decipher an item on a particular page (yes it shows the page no. and document name). One would merely have to open that document, then go to that page and locate and redact the confusing item on a per instance basis.

Here is your statement of fact as far as I can determine:

300 pages with 30 redacts per page would take me:

30 minutes for OCR and 180 minutes for redaction, total 3.5 hours ( that is a generous estimate, my hunch is that the job would actually take 2 hours, but I would have to run the entire job to be sure. That is a business risk when quoting a project like this, so the quote has to be padded)

My standard fee is $50. per hour, with a 2 hour min.

Based on the information you have provided, I would quote that job at 4hrs (without proofreading, I would charge an extra hour for proofreading, if requested. Total $250.00) but no charge for redoing any missed items if requested and I assume no liability for missed items. The kicker is how many of those errors pop up. It depends on how straight forward the text is, i.e. OCR has some difficulty with signatures, letterheads, agate (5.5 pt or smaller) type etc.

I am not sure, but, alternately, this thread may be sufficient as evidence.

Bill D.