Raritan Borough has settled its appeal of an OPRA case, Gannett v. Raritan Borough, by agreeing to pay $650,000.

This means that the court will not issue an opinion in what was one of the most important pending OPRA cases. The appeal involved several novel, significant issues concerning access to records in electronic format and the amount a public entity may charge the requestor for converting the records to that format.

An appellate court opinion also would have established precedent governing how attorney fee awards should be calculated under OPRA. The $650,000 settlement represents, by far, the largest attorney fee amount paid by a public body to a prevailing OPRA requestor. While the case is not precedential, it does serve as a warning that some OPRA matters can generate extremely high attorney fee liability for public bodies.