From Three Weeks to Three Minutes: How Auto-Redaction Tamed the FOIA Flood
Local Government Agency
At a Glance
It was an election year, and journalists were flooding the office with public records requests. Every request meant the same painful process: pull the case file, print it out, grab a black marker, and start manually redacting names, dates, and other protected information.
Each request took days of staff time. The backlog grew. Legal deadlines loomed. And every manual redaction carried the risk of human error -- miss one name, and confidential information goes public. Redact too aggressively, and the response gets challenged for non-compliance.
Ethico improved their workflow by introducing field-level confidentiality tagging within MyCM. Instead of redacting after the fact, staff now tagged sensitive fields as "Confidential" during the normal course of case management. When a public records request came in, the system generated an export with those fields automatically sanitized.
The approach flipped the model from reactive redaction to proactive classification. By the time a FOIA request arrived, the case file was already prepared for release. The export preserved the structure of the record while stripping protected information -- no markers required.
FOIA response time dropped from three weeks to three days. The backlog disappeared. Staff who had been consumed by redaction work returned to their primary responsibilities.
The accuracy improved as well. Because confidentiality decisions were made during case intake -- when the context was fresh -- the redactions were more precise than the after-the-fact marker approach. The agency faced zero challenges to their responses in the following year.
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