Tips and best practices for RTKL requests for e-mails
A lot of RTKL requests either explicitly seek e-mails or require an agency to search for e-mails. Understanding some of the steps agencies may take to perform a search and review of email records can help you write a more specific request. When your request for emails is adequately targeted, you can cut down on the time it takes for an agency to search and review records, meaning that you’ll get a faster response and you won’t get a ton of emails that aren’t actually related to what you’re trying to learn about.
I’ll use a RTKL Request I personally submitted as an example:
“All e-mails sent to and from Councilwoman Jamie Gauthier's office (including chief of staff, constituent services representatives, and general e-mail addresses), and within the Councilwoman’s office, between April 1, 2021 and May 12, 2021 relating to the Zoning Variance Request at 48th Street and Chester Avenue.”
When an agency receives a RTKL request that seeks emails, it first has to assess whether the request is sufficiently specific under Section 703 of the RTKL. Remember: subject matter, scope, and timeframe. My request was specific on all three:
Subject matter: the zoning variance request at 48th Street and Chester Avenue
Scope: emails within Councilwoman Jamie Gauthier’s office
Timeframe: 4/1/21 to 5/12/21 (the date I submitted the request)
After concluding the request is sufficiently specific, the agency has to actually search for the records.
The first step of the search is to come up with search parameters, which is why it’s so crucial that requests be specific. In my example request, the agency would also have to determine which individuals may have sent or received relevant records. I didn’t list specific individuals because I don’t know who might have been involved. So the agency has to ask: who was in charge of this project and who did they consult along the way? The agency has options here: ask the relevant email senders and recipients to search their e-mails themselves, or have someone run a search on the agency’s e-mail server. Unless the request is extremely specific (as in, seeks one or two emails described so sufficiently that I can just ask the agency employee who sent it to forward it to me) searching the IT server is usually the best practice.
One reason to define your subject matter by description rather than providing specific keywords is that it gives the agency a little bit of flexibility to adjust its server search to cut down on unrelated emails. For example, if my example request asked for all emails including the terms “48th”, “zoning variance” or “Chester Avenue” I might also get a ton of emails asking about bike lanes and adding speed bumps, or complaints about traffic or other variances. So letting the agency search and refine its search by tinkering with some Boolean search operators will usually get you the best result.
Once the agency actually searches and pulls all of the potentially responsive emails, someone has to read them all, make redactions of information exempted by the RTKL, keep track of the emails that were withheld entirely, and then send out the public records. If you have a big request, you should expect the agency to ask for an extension, and you should grant it, because this is time consuming.
From here, the agency goes through the same analysis it would for any other set of records: is the document protected by attorney-client privilege? Is it exempt by one of the provisions in Section 708(b)(1)-(30)? Is there personal information (dates of birth, home addresses) protected by the constitutional right to privacy?