Every redaction is a legal decision. Most are made in Acrobat.
California's public records system is buckling, and redaction is where it breaks. This page is the problem. The rest is available on request.
The requests went up. The ability to charge for them went away.
California public records request volume rose 94% between 2018 and 2023, and 136% by 2024. The records responsive to those requests grew 179% over the same period. Then in 2020 the California Supreme Court confirmed that agencies cannot charge requesters for the staff time spent searching or redacting.
So the work multiplied and the cost of it landed entirely on the agency. There is no version of this where an office absorbs a 136% increase in volume by working harder.
A single request can consume most of a staff month.
A complex CPRA request can take 150 to 300 staff hours to fulfil. One prolific requester in Fontana generated more than $300,000 in agency legal and compliance costs in a single matter. Coverage of the 2024 reform push described a large California municipality receiving over 9,000 records requests in a year — roughly thirty every business day.
Most of those hours are not spent deciding whether to disclose. They are spent finding the exempt material, marking it, justifying it, and proving afterwards that the call was made correctly. That is the labour nobody has automated in a way California agencies can actually use.
58 counties. 482 cities. Several thousand special districts.
Almost none of them have legal-technology staff. The tools that handle this volume well are priced for organisations that do — enterprise platforms running five figures a month and requiring someone whose job is to operate them.
Below that tier, the options thin out fast, and most California agencies are redacting public records the same way they did fifteen years ago: by hand, one document at a time, with no record of why any particular call was made.
A redaction tool that knows it is working in California.
PRAready is purpose-built for the California Public Records Act rather than adapted from federal practice, and it is designed to fit the workflow an agency already runs rather than replace it. A person still makes every call. The reasoning behind each one is captured as it happens, not reconstructed later.
That is as much as we are putting in public at this stage.
Behind a password, and we will give you the password.
The full page covers how the classification works, how it fits alongside the request portals agencies already use, what we think the existing tools get wrong, and where the build actually stands. If you run records for a California agency, work in this space, or are writing about it — just ask.