Redacting Sensitive Data Before Using AI

Hi everyone,

One of the most common questions we hear from in-house employment lawyers is:
“Even if an AI tool promises strong privacy protections, should I really be uploading contracts with employee PII?”

The short answer: most lawyers still prefer to scrub sensitive data first. It’s a way to stay in control and reduce the chance that a third-party system stores information it shouldn’t.

The typical workflow looks like this:

• Start with an employment contract.

• Remove identifiers of the company or hiring manager.

• Remove all personally identifiable information (employee name, title, phone, email, address).

• Keep in place the business-critical details (salary, compensation, start date, job terms).

• Upload the scrubbed version to your AI tool (ChatGPT, etc.) to ask questions.
  

To make that easier, here’s a shortlist of redaction tools worth exploring. We don’t have affiliations with any of these, and would love to hear if you’ve found one that works especially well in practice.

• Stirling PDF (Free, Open Source)
  Self-hosted, or install on your own machine. Auto-redact feature accepts text or regex. It’s free because they have a paid commercial product.
  👉 Stirling PDF
  

• Xodo / PDF Studio (~$10/month)
  There’s a web version but you can also install the desktop app with offline redaction. There’s a free trial period and then it’s paid.
  👉 Xodo PDF Studio
  

• Redacto (From $299/month)
  Supports PDFs, Word, spreadsheets, images.
  👉 Redacto
  

• SmallPDF (Free or Paid)
  Easy to use, but primarily web-based. There is a desktop application but the macOs version isn’t supported since 2021
  👉 SmallPDF

• Foxit Smart Redact (~$100/year + PDF editor)
  Desktop option, integrates with Foxit’s PDF suite.
  👉 Foxit Smart Redact

• Amicus5 (Free, Open Source)
  Works with Word, Excel, and PDF. Uses local LLMs. Output is clunky but promising for tinkerers.
  👉 Amicus5

• Adobe Acrobat Pro (~$20/month)
  Trusted default for many corporate teams, includes built-in redaction for PDFs.
  👉Adobe Acrobat Redaction