Reply to MCPS Charging Parental Rights Group $18K to Fulfill Public Information Request

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The request was probably too broad.  If it takes 440 hours they were probably requesting every document in the system to be viewed or scanned in some way.[/quote]

You can see the substance of the request at the link. They’re asking for emails containing “opt-out” and "opt out" sent from 30 addresses over a 6 month period.

That's an easy search to run on the back-end. Manual processing time would obviously depend on the number of emails, but I'd be surprised if there are more than a thousand or so. Probably much less after deduplication.

I've done FOIAs ordered if magnitude bigger than that. And we didn't charge, despite the FOIA being obviously malicious.

I fully support charging, but $18k is ridiculous.
[/quote]

I agree.  I have had my emails searched multiple times for FOIA requests. They send over a paralegal to do a search on the key words on my Outlook and extract all the responsive emails.  I can't recall it ever taking more than five or so minutes. Someone then reviews to see what should be deleted. That is more time consuming.[/quote]

These days they would typically run the search on the Google Workspace or Outlook server using e-discovery tools. You just tell it what accounts to search, the date range, and the list of keywords. You get back a PST file containing the responsive emails, which can be filtered from there.

They should be able to run the entire search in less than 10 minutes.

The time-consuming part would be processing the emails returned, but it shouldn't take more than a minute or two to read each email looking for confidential material.

440 hours is absurd.[/quote]

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