The Supreme Court recently held argument in Paff v. Galloway Twp., concerning whether OPRA permits a request that a public body create a log showing the sender, recipient, date and subject matter of emails of certain Township employees over a specific period of time.

This is a rare case where the outcome can be predicted based on the oral argument. The justices raised no objections to the argument of the requestor’s attorney that this is a valid OPRA request because it simply involves extracting certain information already shown in the emails existing in the Township’s computer system. And the justices were politely contemptuous of the counter-argument that this is an invalid request for the creation of a new record.

Unfortunately, there was hardly any mention during the argument of the consequences of holding that this type of request is permissible. As I’ve explained, see this post, the result will be that OPRA requestors can compel public bodies to produce reports from the information contained in computer databases, with the data organized according to the requestor’s preference. Custodians will effectively be research staffers for requestors, obligated to compile for requestors reports that did not previously exist.