When public entities respond to records requests for the legal bills of outside counsel, they cannot charge for the cost of reviewing the bills in order to redact privileged and confidential information, a New Jersey judge says.
The Open Public Records Act allows records custodians to impose a “special service charge” when complying with a request that “involves an extraordinary expenditure of time and effort,” but Hackensack’s municipal attorney Thomas Scrivo’s review of his own invoices did not qualify.
