How to Finalize a Document

Last updated: August 12, 2026

In this article: How to lock in your redactions and mark a document as ready for export.

Once you've completed your redactions on a document, you can finalize it to lock them in. When a document is finalized, it moves out of edit mode and redactions are permanently locked- it's then ready to be included in your export.

How to finalize a document

Open the document in the document viewer
Click the Finalize Document button in the top toolbar

The document will be locked and ready for export. You'll see a confirmation that the document has been finalized.

Once a document is finalized, redactions are locked and cannot be edited. To make changes, click the Unfinalize Document button to unfinalize it, make your edits, then refinalize when done.

This also means an Entire Case redactions won't apply to files that are already finalized. To redact a term across the whole case, apply the Entire Case redaction before finalizing, or unfinalize the affected documents first.

Finalizing/Unfinalizing multiple documents at once

Select the documents you want to finalize using the checkboxes in the document list
Click the Finalize/Unfinalize button in the bulk action bar at the bottom of the screen

You can also use Advanced Search to find a specific set of documents and bulk finalize the results- useful if you want to finalize all documents matching a particular search criteria at once:

Select Search entire case
Enter your desired search
Click Select All or manually select the relevant documents
Select Finalize/Unfinalize

Previewing finalized documents

By default, finalized documents display in markup view - redacted text appears with a strikethrough rather than blacked out. To see the clean redacted version as it will appear in your export:

From the left sidebar, click Experiments
Toggle on Preview Finalized Files

This will show the redacted version of any finalized documents across your case.

What's next?

Export your documents → Export Your Case