It’s easy to make the business case for efficiency. Most teams are looking for ways to do things faster without sacrificing quality. In the realm of education, the goal is a faster public records process that simultaneously improves quality. And quantitatively, it’s easy to make the business case for that efficiency. But what does a faster response mean qualitatively?

When you look beneath the mechanics and bureaucracy, the public records response is a human-centric process. It’s communicating with people, being accountable to our communities, and protecting people’s privacy. So, when a response can be fulfilled more efficiently, you win across all those metrics. Communication improves, accountability increases, and personal privacy (PII) is secured.

The other week, the Logikcull team sat down with Emma Berrigan, Records Manager at Poudre School District in Northern Colorado, to learn more about how her public records process allows her to move faster, improve communication and accountability, and strengthen protections for personally identifiable information.

Berrigan oversees records response for a 54-school district of roughly 25,000 students, working under Colorado’s Open Records Act (CORA), which gives the district three business days to respond once a request comes in. The requests she fields span CORA public records, FERPA and student records, personnel files, subpoenas, warrants, and litigation holds, and their scope swings from one narrow ask to a sweeping any-and-all-records demand. The clock never adjusts for scope, so the process behind it has to.

The Old Way Was Slow, and It Showed

Before Poudre implemented Logikcull, the process ran by hand, one document at a time. Collecting relevant emails meant opening every message individually, wading through duplicates and tangled threads to find what actually mattered. Redacting personally identifiable information meant printing records, marking them up by hand, and photocopying each page a second time, because once wasn’t always enough to guarantee the marker didn’t show through. Legal holds lived in a spreadsheet, with preservation notices and custodian reminders tracked manually and chased down over email.

“I’m very thankful that they got Logikcull before I came on, because the previous way would have never worked for me,” Berrigan says of joining after the district had already made the switch. The slowness wasn’t just an efficiency problem. A process that consumed hours in duplicate emails and hand redaction left less room for the district to communicate fully, document its own accountability, or catch every piece of sensitive data before release.

Communication: A Faster, More Complete Answer

Poudre gives every requester one free hour of staff time before a time-and-cost estimate kicks in. Under the old manual process, that hour was lost to email collection and hand redaction before the team could produce much of anything, so the district’s opening response arrived thinner than it should have been.

Logikcull changed the math. Berrigan now moves through the same records fast enough to produce substantially more within that same free hour, no extra charge to the requester, no extra time on the clock. The result isn’t just speed for its own sake: the district’s opening response goes out more complete, which means the requester hears back with more of the picture, sooner. “The time-saving capabilities, I can’t speak to enough. They feel essential to do my job effectively and in a timely manner,” Berrigan says.

That’s communication improving in practice, not in theory. As Berrigan puts it: “In today’s world, if you don’t have something like this, you can’t effectively move forward, be transparent, and be responsive to requests.” A faster process doesn’t just clear a records manager’s desk. It’s the difference between a resident, a journalist, or a parent getting a partial answer or a complete one.

Accountability: A Documented, Defensible Process

Beyond public records requests, Poudre also runs its legal holds through Logikcull, which Berrigan calls a “huge” improvement over the spreadsheet it replaced. Preservation notices now run from templates built for each matter type, from state complaints to due process hearings, instead of living in a document someone has to remember to update.

The Microsoft 365 integration lets the team place a hold on a custodian’s data in a few clicks and track its full lifecycle from there. For a district that has to prove preservation through state complaints, due process hearings, and litigation, that documented lifecycle is the difference between asserting defensibility and actually showing it. The review workflow reinforces the same accountability: Berrigan flags anything she has questions about, and legal reviews only those flagged items rather than re-reading the entire set, so oversight lands where it’s needed instead of getting diluted across every document.

Protecting Privacy: PII Secured, Not Just Redacted

A district handling FERPA and student records can’t treat privacy protection as a formality, and Poudre’s old process put it at real risk. Printing, hand-marking, and double-photocopying every sensitive document left plenty of room for a name, an ID number, or an address to slip through.

Bulk redaction closes that gap. Auto-highlighting surfaces sensitive data during review, and bulk redaction clears it in one motion wherever an identifier repeats, rather than page by page. “I might just go to the bulk redact and redact all of the student and employee IDs throughout all of the documents, which really saves a lot of time,” Berrigan says. Global deduplication helps here too: cutting the email pileup by as much as 90% before review even starts means less data changing hands in the first place, and less surface area for something sensitive to slip through. “Global deduplication is my best friend, especially when it comes to emails,” she says.

One Workflow, Every Request Type

All three of those wins run through the same public records request software, not three separate tools. A request comes in, and Berrigan opens a single Logikcull project for it. A template built for that request type, FERPA, public records, litigation, loads the right tags automatically. Global deduplication clears the email pileup. Berrigan reviews and tags the records, flagging what needs a second look. Auto-highlighting and bulk redaction clear sensitive data. Legal reviews the flagged items. The district produces the request. The process is more efficient, saving time and money for both Poudre and the requester.

Though time savings anchor Poudre’s story, they undersell what those hours buy. A lean records team is guarding some of the district’s most sensitive data, student files, personnel records, litigation holds, against a three-day statutory clock and a volume that keeps climbing. Logikcull lets that team hit the deadline, document accountability, keep student and employee data protected, and provide the public with a complete answer every time.

They’ve invested in the process, and in doing so, communication, accountability, and privacy protection have all improved.

Logikcull is the AI-powered eDiscovery and public records response platform built for the high-frequency requests agencies face every day. Essential to 1,500+ organizations, including the largest state and local government agencies, higher education institutions, and school districts, Logikcull lets customers kick off responses in seconds, find critical documents in minutes, and predict spend to the penny, all with drag-and-drop ease. See how it works for districts like yours, or read how Madison Metropolitan School District eliminated its own records backlog.