Built for California state agencies
Three judgments on every record. One pass.
Every exemption cited.
Autessa FirstPass™ for Public Records determines whether each document is responsive, whether it is exempt, and what to redact, across divisions, regional offices, and the Office of the General Counsel. Every exemption and redaction carries its CPRA citation. A reviewer on your staff keeps the final call.
- No upfront cost
- Unlimited users
- Running in days
- Affordable for agencies of all sizes
What it changes for your office
Requests keep growing. Staffing does not.
Records volume compounds every year: more email, more text, more video, and now AI drafting both the documents agencies create and the requests they receive. FirstPass helps the team you have keep up.
For the analyst
One pass makes the three determinations that used to take three reads. FirstPass carries the volume; the analyst works the exceptions and the close calls, and clears far more documents in a day: enforcement files, permit and licensing records, program data, and the email around all of it.
For the PRA Coordinator and regional liaisons
A request that touches two regional offices and a headquarters program is the hardest case a state agency handles, and consultation between components is one of the enumerated grounds for the 14-day extension. Every liaison works from the same encoded exemption set with the same citations, so a determination made in the field matches one made in Sacramento. The Coordinator sees the whole request in one queue and generates reliable, auditable reports on demand.
For the Office of the General Counsel
Audited records, not just logs. The audit record covers FirstPass's own activity alongside the reviewers' decisions: every determination with its basis, its reasoning, and the rule version that produced it, every override, every rule change. OGC sees the close calls without re-reading the file, and reports are customizable to the moment: the exemption log for a response, the full trail when a withholding is challenged.
The product
Autessa FirstPass, what your team works in.
PowerViewer
The reviewer's view, engineered from time-and-motion testing of how records review actually gets done. Flip through thousands of pages and documents with everything a determination needs in front of you: the document, the classification, the citation, what is marked for redaction, and the FirstPass Compliance Assistant for the borderline question. Shortcut keys carry a reviewer through pages, documents, and queues. Once the reviewer accepts the marks, the redactions are applied to the release copy while the original stays untouched.
Compliance Assistant
Your agency's records practice, answerable in place. A reviewer working a borderline document asks the question and gets your agency's answer with the authority behind it, including how your office handled the same question the last three times, which is the answer people actually walk down the hall for. It strengthens onboarding for new analysts, and FirstPass reports on recurring questions to help plan training.
Protected Registry
One example of the agency-specific customization built in. Names your agency places on the registry are redacted on sight, in every document, regardless of context. Some identities can never depend on a judgment call made under deadline, and the registry removes the judgment: the protection travels with the name, across every request, until your agency removes it.
Collaboration
A close call does not have to be made alone. Without leaving the document, a reviewer can easily invite a colleague to review and share their opinion: the same pages, the same citation, the same marks. No forwarding a file, no explaining the situation from scratch, no waiting for a meeting.
Learning Loop
Your reviewers' corrections become your agency's rules. Every override is captured with its reasoning. Corrections that recur surface as candidate rules a records coordinator reviews, refines, and adopts into the agency's library, or declines. The system changes only when a person accepts the change.
Rule Library
The source of truth for your agency's exemption practice. Every exemption your office applies is encoded as a rule with its citation, and your agency decides which ones FirstPass may assert on its own and which always route to a person. Those defaults apply to every request without anyone retyping them. Updating a rule is a records coordinator's edit, and the change takes effect on the very next document. Your standing exemptions are encoded as your office applies them, including the program statutes that live outside the Act and the ones your counsel has already taken a position on. Rules carry both the current section and the old 6250-series number, because your templates, your precedents, and the case law have not all moved at the same speed. Over time the library becomes your agency's institutional knowledge in working form: the exemptions you apply, how you apply them, and every change on the record.
Audit Defense Reporting
Every determination, its statutory basis, its actor, and its timestamp, covering FirstPass's own activity alongside the reviewers' decisions, exportable as CSV, PDF, or JSON. The exemption log for a response and the full trail for a challenge come from the same record, built the day the calls were made.
The log is append-only: entries are added, never edited or removed, so what you produce months later is what was recorded at the time. Each determination also records the version of the rule that produced it, so a call made in March is explained against the rule as it stood in March. When counsel asks why document 214 was withheld, the answer is a lookup.
AI activity is audited and governed
Most systems log what people did. FirstPass logs what it did: every automated determination attributed to the system as actor, the rule and version behind it, the exemption asserted or declined, and every document it routed to a person instead of deciding. You will have to answer for this system before you deploy it, and again after. What it decides on its own, what it escalates, how each of those is evidenced, that comes out of the trail, not out of a questionnaire we fill in for you.
One record, several reports
The exemption log that accompanies a response, the withholding index for an appeal, and the complete trail counsel needs for litigation are views of the same record, generated on demand rather than assembled after the fact.
In practice
The details that decide whether a release holds up.
Three of them, handled the way your office already handles them: what the release copy has to show, what happens to the original, and what a redaction has to rest on.
On the release copy
Every redaction states the exemption it stands on
Your response has to name the exemption behind each withholding, which in most offices means an analyst labeling boxes by hand on the way out the door. FirstPass prints the code inside each box as the redaction is applied, so the release explains itself and the exemption log matches it line for line, and marking at the box level, not the document level, keeps segregable material in the release where it belongs.
On the files
The original stays exactly as uploaded
Through every stage of review and release, the record you uploaded is the record FirstPass holds. Redactions are applied to a separate release copy, and both are kept.
On the law
A balancing call is not ours to make
The deliberative call is a balancing call, made on this record, and no software should be making it for you. FirstPass will not assert § 7922.000 on its own. It routes the document to a reviewer with the showing that has to be made and what in the record bears on it, which is the part that takes the time.
Below: the same document in PowerViewer, with the release copy on the left and the basis for every call on the right.
Defensibility
When a withholding is challenged, the answer already exists.
Today, defending a withholding means reconstructing it: pulling old emails, asking the analyst who has since left, rebuilding reasoning from memory months after the call was made. The burden of justifying it was always yours, the fees run one direction, and the determination went out long before anyone thought about litigation.
With FirstPass, the record was built the day the call was made. Every determination carries its statutory basis, its reasoning, and the version of the rule that produced it, so a call made in March can be explained in November against the rule as it stood in March. The audit log is append-only and recorded by the system itself, covering FirstPass's activity and every reviewer decision. When counsel asks why document 214 was withheld, the answer is an export.
The agency keeps the determination throughout. FirstPass proposes each call and cites its basis; a reviewer confirms or overrides it. When a document alone cannot settle a question, FirstPass routes it to a person with the open question stated.
Your records stay inside your own boundary, and corrections your reviewers make refine your agency's rules alone. As a state agency you also answer to the Information Practices Act (Civil Code § 1798 et seq.) for the personal information you hold, on top of the program statutes your enabling law imposes. Those obligations are encoded as rules, not left to recall.
One record, every call accounted for, including the rules that found nothing.
The same evidence across the whole request, exportable the day it is asked for.
See it run on your own records.
Bring a request your team has already closed. We run FirstPass on it, and you measure the output against the determinations your analysts made and defended.
FAQ
Questions we're glad to answer.
Is FirstPass configured for the CPRA specifically?+
Yes, and configured to your agency rather than to the Act in the abstract. The standing CPRA exemptions ship encoded; your program statutes, your positions on the recurring questions, and the calls your counsel has already made get built in during setup. The catch-all is a routing rule, never something FirstPass asserts on its own. Citations carry both the current and 6250-series numbering.
How does FirstPass handle a document it is unsure about?+
It routes the document to a reviewer with the open question stated, for example whether the public interest in withholding a draft clearly outweighs disclosure, a record-specific showing the document alone cannot make.
What happens when a reviewer disagrees with FirstPass?+
The reviewer's call governs, and the override is captured with its reasoning. Overrides that recur surface as candidate rules a records coordinator can review and adopt, so a question your office has already settled stays settled.
How does FirstPass fit a request that spans divisions and regional offices?+
The request is one queue. Regional and divisional liaisons work the documents they hold, in the same view, against the same encoded exemption set, and the PRA Coordinator sees the whole request at once. Consultation between components is one of the recognized grounds for an extension, and the point of working in one place is to need it less often.
Does our data train a model used by other agencies?+
No. Your records stay inside your own boundary, and corrections your reviewers make refine your agency's rules alone. As a state agency you also answer to the Information Practices Act (Civil Code § 1798 et seq.) for the personal information you hold, on top of the program statutes your enabling law imposes. Those obligations are encoded as rules, not left to recall.
Does FirstPass make the final disclosure decision?+
No. FirstPass proposes a determination with its basis cited, and a reviewer on your staff confirms or overrides it. An agency can later choose to clear specific high-confidence categories automatically. That is a decision the agency makes deliberately.
Can we test FirstPass on our own records before committing?+
Yes, and that is how we suggest every evaluation start. Bring a request your team has already closed. FirstPass runs on the same set and you compare its output against the determinations your analysts made and defended.
How much does FirstPass cost?+
There is no upfront cost, no per-seat charge, and no user limit. Pricing follows usage and is set to be affordable for agencies of any size, so each agency pays in proportion to the records it processes. We work with each agency to make the cost predictable for budget forecasting. The specifics depend on volume and configuration, which a first conversation covers.
How long does FirstPass take to set up?+
Days, depending on the size of the agency and how much configuration your exemption set requires. There is no implementation project.
What file formats does FirstPass handle?+
Email with thread parsing and attachment expansion (MSG, EML, ICS), including messages nested inside messages. Office in both current and legacy formats (DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, DOC, XLS, PPT, RTF), OpenDocument (ODT, ODS, ODP), and Apple Pages. PDF, including scanned pages, which are read visually rather than by character recognition. Plain text, CSV, Markdown, log files, and HTML. Images (JPEG, PNG, TIFF, GIF, BMP, WebP) with EXIF and GPS extraction. Audio and video, where the transcript is produced by the speech-to-text service and reviewed as text. Zip archives are expanded and each item reviewed on its own.
What happens to a file type FirstPass cannot read?+
It is still ingested and routed to a reviewer, never dropped. A production cannot survive a record that silently disappeared, so an unrecognized or unreadable file becomes a document in the queue with the reason stated, for example a rights-protected message that cannot be decrypted. The reviewer decides what to do with it, and the file appears in the audit trail either way.
What security certifications does Autessa hold?+
Autessa is certified to ISO 42001 and ISO 27001 and attested under SOC 2 Type II. Autessa is HIPAA and GDPR compliant and aligned to NIST 800-53 Moderate. A CJIS Security Addendum is executed with each agency. Reports and certificates are available for review.
Also available for Washington.