BASALT · JOURNAL
Redacting in family law matters
Family matters differ from other litigation in one important respect: the parties frequently know each other, and disclosure can create physical risk rather than commercial disadvantage.
Addresses above everything
In matters involving domestic abuse, an address is the single most dangerous piece of information in the file, and it appears in more places than anyone expects.
On correspondence letterheads. In email signatures pasted into exhibits. On bank statements. On school letters. In photograph metadata, where a picture taken at home carries GPS coordinates.
That last one is missed constantly. An image embedded in a PDF can carry EXIF data with a precise location, and no amount of reviewing the visible page reveals it.
Children
Names, schools, medical information and photographs of children are routinely restricted, and in many jurisdictions publication is prohibited outright rather than merely discouraged.
Descriptions can identify as effectively as names where the circumstances are unusual, which is the same small cohort problem that affects school records.
Financial disclosure
Full financial disclosure produces the same over-disclosure seen elsewhere: complete statement runs where only certain transactions are relevant, revealing spending patterns that indicate location, routine and associations.
Where safety is a concern, spending patterns are locating information.
Third parties
New partners, family members and friends appear throughout and are frequently left in because the file is thought of as being about the two parties.
Practical checks
Extract text and search for addresses and postcodes specifically, not just names.
Strip image metadata. Photographs are the most likely carrier of precise location, and stripping metadata should be automatic on any file containing them.
Read document metadata for the author field and file paths, which can name a party.
The order that works
Decide first whether the material needs to be in the bundle at all. The safest redaction is a document that was never included, and family bundles are routinely padded with material nobody relies on.
This is a description of common practice rather than legal advice. Obligations vary by jurisdiction and by the terms you are working under, and the authority that governs your work is the one to check with.
Frequently asked questions
What is most important to redact in family law documents?
Addresses, in matters involving domestic abuse. They appear on letterheads, in email signatures, on bank and school letters, and in photograph metadata, which is the carrier most often missed.
Can a photograph reveal an address?
Yes. An image embedded in a PDF can carry EXIF metadata including precise GPS coordinates, and nothing on the visible page reveals it. Image metadata should be stripped from any file containing photographs.
How should children's information be handled?
Names, schools, medical information and photographs are routinely restricted and in many jurisdictions prohibited from publication. Descriptions can identify as effectively as names where circumstances are unusual.
Does full financial disclosure need redacting?
Frequently. Complete statement runs reveal spending patterns that indicate location, routine and associations, which is locating information where safety is a concern. Extract the relevant entries rather than producing everything.
Doing it in Basalt
Basalt is a native macOS PDF toolkit built around redaction that removes content rather than covering it. After writing a file it re-opens its own output with an independent parser, searches for the material again, and refuses to save if anything is found. It also strips metadata, XMP, attachments, embedded scripts and hidden layers as part of the same operation, and a separate Inspector reports what any PDF still hides, including documents Basalt did not create. Everything runs on your Mac: the engine holds no network entitlement at all, which macOS enforces at the code-signature level. A one time $29 licence covers up to three Macs, free for the first 24 hours. basaltformac.com, or brew install --cask chipmunk1101/tap/basalt.
Redaction that proves itself
Basalt destroys the content you mark, then re-opens the file it wrote and proves the content is gone before it saves anything. Your documents never leave your Mac.