Inside the Work of Building Casepoint FOIA

Serving as a bridge between FOIA professionals and the product meant to serve them requires a certain balance, and the weight of that isn’t lost on the person in the middle of it all.

“I’m a huge believer in FOIA as a pillar of democracy,” said Victoria Cash, Casepoint’s Director of Product (FOIA). “One thing that has really stood out to me is the people I meet in FOIA. They are all about the mission. They really care, and they’re struggling a lot these days.”

For someone who talks to FOIA professionals on a regular basis, Cash has a clear view of the day-to-day pressure behind the work. She listens to what FOIA teams are facing and then turns those needs into product decisions.

“But really, it’s about: How do we make software that helps FOIA people do their job and uphold democracy? That’s how I think of it.”

The First Step: Understanding the Pressure

Even before the work of locating and reviewing records begins, FOIA professionals often have to determine whether a request belongs to them at all. A request for information is not always a clean starting point.

“Agencies regularly receive requests from people who don’t know all of the nuances between federal agencies,” Cash said. “If they’re looking for certain types of records, they may make assumptions based on the agency name. They’re genuine requests, but they’re records that the agency doesn’t possess.”

Yet FOIA teams still have to triage the request: take it in, review it, confirm if the agency has the records, and send the appropriate response. That process takes time from the requests that they need to process. And, of course, that’s before the larger pressure sets in.

“Honestly, right now, the biggest thing is still resources,” Cash said. “FOIA offices have been gutted. They’re still under the 20-day statutory guideline, but they can’t meet that if the workload is the equivalent of one person trying to handle 100 requests a day. There’s only so much one person can do.”

Those realities impact how she thinks about product. For example, technology should help teams with early triaging, especially for requests that they shouldn’t have to work on.

The Next Step: Turning Feedback Into Product Decisions

Take the previous example further. A FOIA professional receives another request that isn’t necessarily theirs. What happens?

Most often, it’s manual. It takes time to sort through the mix of duplicate, misdirected, or incomplete requests. Teams might have a templated email they send out, but again, that’s done by hand.

“Our software tries to help them get through some of those pain points, like filtering out the things they don’t need to worry about,” Cash said. “The faster they can get to real requests they should be processing, the faster they can actually do that work, which is hard.”

“Most people don’t understand how much work goes into that. We can help at the front end, with lots of automation, so they can get to done as quickly as possible.”

Email templates show how that works in practice. They can be triggered automatically, based on any change to status or a specific field. They can completely conform to whatever processes they have. Once people see this process in action, through their own workflows or a demo, they say how much they love that flexibility.

“At any step along the way where communication needs to be sent, that can be automated 100%, so people don’t have to remember to do that step,” Cash said. “It’s all captured in the logs and in the correspondence area, so there’s a complete record of all communications that have gone from the system, which makes for a more complete and defensible administrative record.”

That flexibility reflects how automation is changing how agencies — and Cash — think about FOIA technology. The goal is to give teams more control over their processes while staying compliant.

“It’s a new way of managing and thinking about your processes,” she said. “It’s a combination of AI, but always human in the loop, as well as automation that you set up and it just does.” For agencies, that can become an opportunity “to rethink everything, streamline, and make a better workflow that makes it easier on people and reduces manual efforts.”

“I personally am a very big believer in purpose-built AI, not black-box AI,” Cash said. “I want to build AI that has value, that helps them while keeping them in the loop. They have total control, but it helps make certain parts of the process go faster or highlights for them the things they need to do.”

Integrating that kind of thinking into the product, though, is hardly simple.

Behind the Scenes of a Product Decision

A lot of changes to the software seem straightforward on the surface. Add a field. Move a button. Give teams another option in a workflow.

But in a FOIA platform, even small changes can touch reporting, searching, logs, and security.

“We have to take all of that into consideration when we put in a new functionality. We’re looking at everywhere it connects within the system, how it behaves, and where we need validation,” Cash said. “A lot of the changes we make, people think are simple. But we spend a huge amount of time thinking through every step a person would go through in the system. It’s much broader than that.”

Take a field. On its own, it sounds easy. But that field may need to show up across the system: in reports, tables, searches, dashboards, email triggers, and other places where users depend on that data. You’d also have to decide how much flexibility to give each agency, as well as where guardrails are needed.

“You have to specifically say: This new field that we’re putting out of the box, where is its footprint everywhere?” Cash said.

The complexity is one reason why she sees product development as an iterative process. A release may solve one part of a larger need, but feedback helps advance progress.

“You might deliver a usable portion of a larger thing in a release, but then you build upon that,” Cash said. “You get that feedback, and that feedback cycle helps you improve it and make it better.”

Her goal is to get to a point where basic functional advancements are in the past, and the team can focus on the finer details of the user experience.

Perhaps that vision isn’t as far off as it might seem. Over the past year, Casepoint FOIA has added custom request types and deeper connections between FOIA and eDiscovery. The software represents the company’s largest product investment.

For Cash, the progress keeps pointing to the same question: What should the software feel like for the people doing the work?

The Human Experience She Wants To Create

“We’re not quite there yet, but I don’t want them to feel like they’re using software,” Cash said. “I want them to feel like they’re using tools that help them and that it is just intuitive.”

She noted how everyone deals with websites, forms, and portals. Behind each one, someone has to manage the process, and a lot of people don’t consciously think about that. Her goal is to make the requester experience as simple as possible, including helping people find the information they want without submitting a FOIA request when it isn’t necessary.

“In my perfect world, the tool just feels natural and aids them,” Cash said. “I don’t want them to feel like they have to take extra clicks or jump through a hoop to get to the place where they need to get in their actual process because the software requires them to. I don’t want the software to be an impediment. I want it to be an empowering kind of experience.”

The goal is intentionally high. No product could ever remove every point of friction in such a complicated process, but that doesn’t make the standard less useful.

“We will never get there,” Cash said. “That’s one of those, ‘I want the world to live in perfect harmony’ ideas. It’s never going to happen, but you keep that as your goal, and it informs decisions, even small things like where a button goes.”

That focus on the people using the software goes back to why she came to Casepoint to work on FOIA in the first place.

“The reason I took this job is because I believe so much in the mission of FOIA and its importance,” Cash said. “Their job is to provide us with the documents of our government. That’s awesome. That infuses everything I do. I’m always thinking of that human aspect and then the broader aspect, and it gives me a lot of fulfillment.”

After spending time at nonprofits and in compliance software, including anti-harassment, civil rights, and equal employment opportunity (EEO), Cash’s work has been centered on products tied to causes she believes in.

“When we know we’re helping people, even if it’s many degrees removed, at the end of the day, the stuff that I do has an impact on helping people. That matters to me.”