The Appellate Division issued a lengthy opinion today concerning various OPRA issues raised by a disappointed bidder for a State contract. Parsons Infrastructure & Environ. Group v. State. Although the opinion is not published, it contains helpful guidance on OPRA’s exemptions for security, trade secrets and privacy, as well as on how to calculate an attorney fee award for an OPRA litigant who is only partially successful.

The most important aspect of the opinion is that it’s the first appellate case to discuss the security exemption after the Supreme Court’s ruling on this exemption in its 2016 Gilleran opinion. The Appellate Division held that Gilleran, which denied access to a building security system, applies equally to other security concerns–in this case, the risk of compromising the State’s computer hardware, software and other information technology systems. The court upheld the denial of the OPRA request on this basis.

The court also affirmed the denial of access to portions of other bids as trade secrets, noting the “fundamental unfairness” of allowing the requestor to duplicate another bidder’s system.

In addition, the Appellate Division rejected the plaintiff’s argument that it should be granted access to this security and trade secret information under the common law right to know.

The court further determined that there was no basis, under OPRA’s protection of privacy, to withhold the names of the bidder’s employees who would be working on the awarded contract. Significantly, the court agreed with the trial judge’s conclusion that disclosure of the names was a relatively trivial aspect of the OPRA lawsuit, and warranted an attorney fee award to the plaintiff of only $3500 for achieving this minimal amount of success in the litigation.