In 2019 the Legislature ordered every executive branch agency onto one email system, run by Enterprise Information Services inside the Department of Administrative Services. The February 2020 progress report to Ways and Means listed what the state was buying with it: “Advanced Compliance: Advanced eDiscovery.” On November 21, 2024, the last on-premises mail server was shut off, with 46 agencies moved. The vendor that supports the system today lists “eDiscovery” among the services it maintains.

Under Request 1, I am asking every state agency in Oregon the same question about its email. The first requests went out on October 22 and October 27, 2026. Before the day was out, one agency had its twelve staff searching their own inboxes, and another was drawing up an invoice for “many hours of staff labor.” The Public Records Advocate’s own 2025 survey of public bodies says “modernized email search tools” brought “significant improvements,” and tells the state to “provide shared software licenses for search tools.”

So the question went to the three offices that hold the answer. The Department of Administrative Services: which agencies are on the system, what eDiscovery it carries, how often it has been used for a public records request, and what it costs an agency to ask. The Department of Justice: what the Attorney General’s manual and training tell public bodies about searching email, and how the Department searches its own. The Secretary of State: what the State Archivist has told agencies about keeping and finding email, and which agencies capture it into a system that can be searched.

Every denial, cost imposed, and/or production is published here in full.