Record retrieval
Some records still need a person to go and get them.
Retrieval is the work that sits outside the automated path: identifying which office actually holds a document, meeting that office's request requirements, and getting the record back in a usable form.
Where retrieval earns its keep
The requests that break an automated pipeline.
The holder is not obvious
The office that holds a document is not always the one the record points to. Identifying the actual custodian is most of the work.
The request has requirements
Forms, identifiers, fees and formats differ by office. A request that does not meet them is not slow — it is rejected.
The output has to be usable
A returned document has to arrive in a form your team can file, read and defend, with its provenance intact.
Handled as an exception path, not a black hole
Retrieval requests are the ones most likely to stall silently in a screening operation. We treat a stalled request as a reportable event: the condition is logged against the jurisdiction and surfaced on the order, rather than absorbed into a turnaround figure that quietly gets worse.
Office closures, fee changes and policy changes get recorded where they belong — against the jurisdiction, so the pattern shows up instead of repeating.
- ScopeDefined per request, against the office that actually holds the record.
- RequirementsConfirmed against what the office will accept before a fee is consumed.
- ExceptionsLogged against the jurisdiction and reported on the order.
- DeliveryReturned to your platform with the method and timestamp attached.
Tell us what keeps stalling.
Retrieval work is judged on the difficult requests, not the easy ones.
Talk to operations