GovGuard

Today, when a city gets a FOIA request, the process is still painfully manual. City clerks have to hunt through archived emails, meeting minutes, PDFs, and shared drives just to find the relevant records. Many offices still manually black out sensitive information with a Sharpie, line by line. Local governments spend billions processing these requests. It’s slow, expensive, and a large request can create massive backlogs. If a city misses the deadline for a request, they can be sued for failing to comply with public records law. GovGuard uses AI agents to automatically search across years of records, flag sensitive information for redaction, and prepare draft response letters for review. Our redaction engine handles harder edge cases like trade secrets and privileged material. Legacy tools require clerks to manually cite state codes for every redaction, while GovGuard is built with these exemptions. The new surge of AI-generated requests are overwhelming clerk offices. Most cities we speak with are seeing request volume grow 2x year over year, with no increase in staff. The tools they have today are basically Jira. They help manage the ticket/request, but not complete the work.