Before and after: How Esper helps government

Esper is purpose-built to simplify the policymaking process. Before Esper, the majority of our government clients relied on legacy IT systems and paper-based processes for policy activity. We gathered the most common success stories from our customers describing how Esper’s technology improves and automates processes to help regulators focus on content and outcomes.

Before Esper

Hours of Research

“Before Esper, I had dozens of tabs open looking up regulations and laws on different government websites.” Laws and regulations are interconnected across jurisdictions, but the research process can be tedious. Regulators must know which state to target, the entity that publishes regulations, and the jurisdiction’s nomenclature. This only starts the journey to finding a similar regulation. Once on the right path, the researcher “grinds through” to find the specific policy that corresponds to theirs.

Tedious Formatting

Each state’s rulemaking process has unique formatting requirements. To comply, regulators spend hours manually redlining documents. One of our clients recalled having “two interns, two program managers, and two lawyers looking at four screens going line-by-line to format all the changes” in accordance with your state’s filing requirements.

Status Updates

Before Esper, our customers estimate the average rulemaking takes at least one year to complete from beginning to end. Project management is executed through endless emails asking “Where are we on this?”. Team members scramble to accurately update the project leader of the status. There is no single source of information where any project member can track the status of the rulemaking.

Lack of Version Control

Which version is the most recent? Who approved it? Did the lawyer review this document too soon? These are amongst the most frequent questions asked during the rule review and approval process. More often than not, people are working off outdated documents, creating confusion and miscommunication across teams.

After Esper

Similar Government Regulations

Esper uses a term frequency algorithm to automatically draw relationships between policies. An Esper user can search any policy based on a citation or keyword and easily find what they’re looking for. Esper shows similar regulations across jurisdictions for quick comparison. The researcher can easily find duplicity in their state or discover how other jurisdictions regulate the topic.

Automatically Formatted Export

Esper automates document formatting so that the end product is properly formatted to your
jurisdiction’s requirements. This saves regulators valuable time that can be spent on more substantive policy work.

Milestones & Activity Log

Esper provides a single source of truth through milestones and an activity log. Milestones correspond to due dates, and the user can check them off as each task is completed. Esper automatically tracks every action taken and reflects the current status in the activity log. This helps reduce email volume and keeps projects on track towards important deadlines.

Collaboration & Workflow

Automated approval diagrams and collaboration tools remove the need to worry about process. Our government clients use Esper’s software to configure their workflow and to successfully move a rulemaking through the Esper workflow from agency to the governor’s office for review and approval. This reduces the friction of email and unknowns about the process.