Case Study: Mecklenburg County achieves faster public records request processing with Exterro Smart ECA

How Mecklenburg County’s PRR Efficiency Sky-Rocketed with the Help of AI Technology

Mecklenburg County’s legal team, led by attorney Twyla Hollingsworth with IT support from Kam Gallman, faced a slow, labor-intensive public records request (PRR) process that relied on paper printouts, manual redactions, and heavy dependence on IT. The disparate digital and physical workflows left staff waiting on collections, sorting through boxes of documents, and spending excessive time locating and sanitizing responsive materials.

By adopting Exterro’s AI-driven Smart Early Case Assessment (Smart ECA), the team can automatically surface and cluster relevant emails and documents before full collection, use in‑place rendering to verify results, and drill into targeted subsets of data. The tool has substantially reduced review and redaction time, improved PRR turnaround, and is now being expanded across e-discovery and litigation workflows with plans to apply it to virtually all requests.

Mecklenburg County

Twyla Hollingsworth

Sr. IT Programmer/Analyst