Built for Washington public 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. Every exemption and redaction carries its statutory basis. 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 reviewer
One pass makes the three determinations that used to take three reads. FirstPass carries the volume; the reviewer works the exceptions and the close calls, and clears far more documents in a day.
For the records officer
Every reviewer works from the same encoded exemption set with the same citations, so determinations stay consistent across analysts and across years. The FirstPass Compliance Assistant and the team collaboration features strengthen onboarding for new staff. The PRO generates reliable, auditable, defensible reports on demand.
For 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. Reports are customizable to what the PRO or counsel needs: the exemption log for a response, the full trail for a challenge.
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 the agency's answer with the authority behind it: whether a draft policy is deliberative, whether an employee's birthdate is exempt, how a similar request was handled before. 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 officer 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 officer's edit, and the change takes effect on the very next document. 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. An agency answering for its use of AI, or an ISO 42001 auditor asking how the system behaved, reads it from the same trail.
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
A requester is entitled to know not just that something was withheld but under what exemption. In most offices that means an analyst labeling redactions one box at a time, by hand, on the way out the door. FirstPass prints the exemption code inside each box as the redaction is applied, so the release explains itself and the exemption log matches it line for line.
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
It knows what a losing redaction looks like
A withholding cannot rest on RCW 42.56.050 alone. That statute defines when privacy is invaded, and the Attorney General's Open Government Resource Manual is explicit that it is not itself an exemption. FirstPass requires a second exemption that independently covers the same text before a privacy redaction stands.
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. Under RCW 42.56.550 the burden of proving the exemption sits with the agency, and fees, costs, and daily penalties sit on the other side of losing.
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.
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 Public Records Act specifically?+
Yes, and configured to your agency rather than to the Act in the abstract. The standing RCW 42.56 exemptions ship encoded, along with the WAC 44-14 model rules guidance. Your program statutes, your positions on the recurring questions, and the calls your counsel has already made get built in during setup.
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 a working draft has been adopted, which the document alone cannot establish.
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 officer can review and adopt, so a question your office has already settled stays settled.
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.
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 California.