Case Study: City of Baltimore achieves tenfold faster open-records responses with Reveal

How the City of Baltimore Uses Reveal to Speed Open Records Response Tenfold

The City of Baltimore, whose legal team of more than 100 serves 15 city departments, struggled to keep up with the volume of Maryland Public Information Act (PIA) open records requests because of a patchwork of on‑premise tools and labor‑intensive workflows (printing, manual redaction, re‑scanning) that slowed responses and risked missed records. Reveal was brought in to address these capacity and transparency challenges.

Reveal implemented a scalable cloud‑based platform that automates ingestion and processing (drag‑and‑drop upload, automatic OCR and searchable PDFs), offers simple “drag‑over” redactions, and provides a browser‑based interface for remote collaboration. The City of Baltimore cut average response time from weeks to as few as a couple hours — roughly a tenfold speedup — reducing missed deadlines, increasing transparency, and freeing staff from manual, time‑consuming tasks.

City of Baltimore

Jason Foltin

Assistant Solicitor