Governors’ offices, reform teams, and legislators
Code and regulatory reform.
Mesa reads every provision of a code against the question you set, analyzes what it finds, and drafts the amendments for the reforms you pursue.
What reform teams use Mesa for.
Inventory outdated, conflicting, and burdensome provisions
Mesa evaluates every provision in the titles you choose, so it catches the ones a keyword search would miss.
A dataset of flagged provisions with citations and reasoning.
A Honolulu City Council member is cleaning up the city’s code with Mesa, starting with transportation.
Exhaustive search
Title 15, Transportation
Revised Ordinances
0
of 1,284 evaluated
- § 15.08.070ObsoleteHorse-drawn carriages on public streetsSets hitching and speed rules; none licensed since 1952.
- § 15.12.030ObsoleteAccident notice at a telegraph officeRequires notice at a telegraph office; none still operate.
- § 15.24.110ConflictingLoading-zone hours, Downtown districtSets 6 a.m. to 6 p.m.; § 15.28.040 says 7 a.m. to 4 p.m.
- § 15.36.050BurdensomeOversize-load permit filed in personNotarized paper form, filed at the counter; no online option.
- § 15.44.020ObsoletePenalty cites a repealed chapterCites Chapter 15.32, repealed in 2009; nothing to enforce.
Analyze each finding and draft the fix
For each provision you pursue, Mesa works out why it causes trouble, what authority governs it, whether the agency can change it without legislation, and how other jurisdictions handle the same problem. Then it drafts the amendment.
A cited analysis of the provision and a redline of the amended text.
§ 12-4.3 Contractor registration renewal
(b) A registrant shall file each renewal in person at the Department’s central office, accompanied by a notarized affidavit of continued compliance.
Every renewal takes an office visit and a notary, even when nothing has changed. Admin. Code § 12-4.3(b)
The ordinance asks only for a statement made under penalty of perjury. Mun. Code § 5.16.040(c)
Not needed. Both steps are in the Department’s own rule, which it can amend. Mun. Code § 2.08.110
- RivermontOnline, signed attestationAdmin. R. 8-210
- FairhavenOnline or mail, signed attestation§ 9.12.030
- MarbrookOnline, notary dropped in 2021§ 4-7.2
(b) A registrant shall file each renewal in person at the Department’s central office, accompanied by a notarized affidavit of continued compliance.
Matches what the ordinance requires and can be adopted by rule. § 5.16.040(c)
Consolidate or cut mandated reports
Mesa finds every report the code requires, who owes it, and whether a later law made it redundant.
An inventory of mandated reports, with candidates for consolidation or repeal.
We ran this review with the State of Colorado.
Streamline permitting
Mesa traces each permit step to the statute, rule, or guidance behind it, and marks which steps an agency can change on its own.
A map of each permit’s steps and the authority for each.
In Boston, the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics uses Mesa for permitting and licensing reform.
Reform procurement rules
Mesa reads procurement statutes, regulations, and agency manuals together and traces each threshold and requirement to its source.
A cited comparison that shows where agency policy goes further than the statute.
Run a fee study
Mesa collects every fee from the ordinances, board resolutions, and county website, matches them up, and flags the ones that disagree.
One fee schedule with each fee’s amount in every source and the action that set it.
A California county is using Mesa for a countywide fee study.
How a review runs.
- 01
Inventory everything
Mesa reads the whole code and returns every candidate, not a sample.
- 02
Set priorities
We sort the list with your team by value and feasibility, and separate out fixes that don’t need legislation.
- 03
Go deep on the few
For each reform you pursue, Mesa researches how other states handled it and drafts the redlines and talking points.
Reform work in Colorado and California.
Colorado
The Governor’s Office policy and reform teams used Mesa to review air quality permitting. With legislation off the table, the work focused on changes the agency could make itself, each backed by how other states handle it.
California
Senior members of the Governor’s cabinet at GovOps, the Department of General Services, and the Governor’s office use Mesa for procurement reform.
In New York, provisions Mesa surfaced for Assemblymember Alex Bores were repealed in the state budget. Read the op-ed in the Times Union
How Mesa compares on legal research.
We asked Mesa and four other AI research tools to find every provision in the U.S. Code that defines a federal crime, a task with a known answer. Mesa found 99.8% of them.
Finding every federal criminal provision in the U.S. Code
Recall, best of three runs per system
Mesa
Leading legal AI startup
Claude Research
Gemini Deep Research
Westlaw AI Jurisdictional Surveys
From “What Is the Law? A System for Statutory Research with Large Language Models” (ICAIL 2025). Each system was asked to identify every provision defining a criminal offense in the United States Code. Recall is measured against a validated superset of Count the Code, an independently compiled catalog of about 2,000 federal criminal provisions.
Stanford RegLab
Before Mesa, we built STARA.
Our co-founder Faiz Surani created STARA, Stanford RegLab’s system for statutory research, and governments used it to find laws that had outlived their purpose. For San Francisco’s City Attorney, it found all 528 reports the municipal code required. The ordinance that cut or consolidated many of them passed in 2026.
The benchmark above comes from the STARA paper. Mesa carries that work forward.
Faiz Surani
Co-founder & CTO
STARA in the press
This work runs in Mesa Research.
Explore Mesa ResearchTell us what you’re reviewing.
Bring the code or the problem you’re working on, and we’ll show you what Mesa finds in it.