Donald M. Doherty Jr.

The Search Bar

A school-board member can move a conversation from an official address to a personal inbox in seconds. The move does not change the subject of the conversation.

Alex Rosetti's January 2023 request began with email logs. He sought sender, recipient, date, time, subject, and attachment information for messages concerning Ramapo-Indian Hills Regional High School Board of Education business — whether those messages had passed through official or personal accounts.

The Board produced a redacted log from the accounts it controlled.

The production showed public business traveling toward private addresses.

The Log Before the Email

An email log records the information surrounding a message rather than the message itself: sender, recipient, transmission time, subject line, and whether an attachment was present. The body stays behind.

An email log can be the most useful first request because it identifies messages before the requester seeks their contents.

Without a log, a member of the public may know that officials discussed a contract, an appointment, a superintendent, a meeting, or a policy — but lack the dates and participants needed to frame a request an agency will accept as sufficiently specific. The log makes the hidden inventory visible before the requester asks for the underlying messages, and before exemptions and redactions are litigated.

Rosetti concerned the preliminary information needed to frame a request for the underlying government messages.

An official who forwards public business to a personal address moves two things out of the system a custodian ordinarily searches: the message, and the index that would have revealed the message exists.

Government Business Inside a Private Account

The dispute joined law to technology. Consumer email systems do not necessarily generate the same automated report a government server produces, and a search for public business inside a personal account has to leave unrelated private correspondence alone.

Doherty represented Rosetti through the trial court, which denied the request in December 2023; through the Appellate Division, which reversed in a published opinion in January 2025; and then in the Supreme Court, which took the case on certification and heard it as a question of first impression.

His argument did not depend on making a private inbox public. It depended on separating the account from the government business conducted inside it — and it built on the doctrinal foundation the Court had already laid. In Paff v. Galloway Township, the Court had held that a log of the information stored in government emails is itself a government record, and that extracting those fields discloses existing records rather than creating new ones. Rosetti asked the Court to follow that logic one step further: if the log is a record when the account is official, the public business inside a personal account cannot be less of one.

A Unanimous Court

On June 11, 2026, in an opinion by Justice Fabiana Pierre-Louis, the Court held unanimously that government-related emails remain government records when officials conduct public business through personal accounts, and that logs of those messages are government records as well. A record's legal identity turns on the public business it documents, not on the domain name attached to the account.

The Court did not open every line of a board member's personal inbox. Private family, financial, medical, and unrelated correspondence remained private. The search follows the government subject through the account and leaves the rest outside the request.

The unanimous Court also advised agencies to counsel employees and elected officials to keep public business out of personal accounts. The dispute, the Court observed, could have been avoided if board members had used the accounts the public issued to them. The American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey and Libertarians for Transparent Government appeared as amici in support of access.

The Search That Must Be Certified

The Court also addressed how an agency proves that a search happened.

Officials must examine the locations where responsive messages may exist — inboxes, sent folders, trash, and other folders used for the relevant business. They must use a method capable of finding government-related messages. And they must submit certifications describing what they did.

A certification converts "we found nothing else" from an untestable conclusion into a representation a court can examine. It identifies the accounts searched, the terms or methods used, the folders reviewed, and the limits encountered.

If official-account logs show messages sent to a private address and the private-account search produces nothing, the certification gives both the requester and the judge a concrete record on which to test the discrepancy. It identifies the search that produced the claimed absence.

The Court did not require agencies to seize personal devices or publish private credentials. Officials perform the searches and certify them. The agency remains responsible for gathering responsive government records from the people who created or kept them while doing public work.

During oral argument, Doherty stated the principle directly: "There is no acceptable reason for discussing government business through private email accounts. None."

One Dollar a Page

Twenty-one years before Rosetti, the barrier was a self-service photocopier.

Camden County charged one dollar per page to copy records in the clerk's office. Burlington County charged fifty cents. Other county clerks charged no more than twenty-five cents.

Thomas Dugan brought a putative class action challenging the higher charges. Doherty represented him with Sander Friedman, who argued the appeal.

In 2005, the Appellate Division held that New Jersey's Open Public Records Act governed copies made through the clerks' self-service machines, and that the charge had to remain tied to actual reproduction cost. Paper, toner, machine use, and supplies belonged in the calculation. Ordinary office labor did not become a per-page cost merely because employees worked near the copier.

The sum at stake in any one transaction was small. Its effect repeated with every deed, lien, filing, map, and record copied by a person who had no alternative source.

A dollar-per-page fee does not announce that access is forbidden. It makes the right more expensive each time someone uses it — which is the more durable obstacle, because nobody has to defend it.

Five Cents, Seven Cents

Current OPRA states the ordinary printed-copy schedule precisely: five cents for a letter-size page or smaller, seven cents for legal-size or larger, unless another law or regulation supplies a different fee. Electronic records are generally provided without a duplication charge, apart from the actual cost of necessary supplies.

The statute also recognizes requests that ordinary copying cannot complete. An agency may impose a reasonable special-service charge where the format, volume, collation, technology, or manipulation required demands extraordinary time or work. The custodian must explain and itemize the charge before incurring it, and the requester may object.

Doherty's requester-side practice puts a proposed charge inside an evidentiary record — translating a flat estimate into staff assignments, pay rates, search steps, export work, conversion work, and actual supplies.

That detail lets a court distinguish genuine technical expense from a charge attached to routine access, and it gives the requester enough information to narrow the request intelligently rather than abandon it.

A Record in a Usable Form

In Scobolink-O'Neill v. Haddon Heights, Doherty represented a requester who challenged the production of a municipal meeting recording in a specialized or high-speed form rather than a format that could be reviewed ordinarily.

Physical delivery is not functional access when the format requires unavailable equipment, proprietary software, or a conversion the requester cannot perform. Current OPRA addresses production in requested media, available conversions, substantial programming, and when an agency may recover permitted technical costs.

Format therefore belongs beside search and price. The public needs a record it can locate, open, read, hear, inspect, and use. A box of unreadable media is not equivalent to a usable production merely because both can be handed across a counter.

The 2024 Law Changed the Bargain

New Jersey's 2024 amendments changed both the drafting and the economics of an OPRA case.

A request must now use the agency's adopted form or include all information the form requires. A correspondence request must identify the job title or accounts to be searched, a specific subject, and a reasonable period. The requester must also disclose whether the records will be used for a commercial purpose.

Those requirements act on the first document in the case. A request seeking all emails about school business — without naming accounts, subject, or period — may fail before the government searches anything.

Under the amended statute, Rosetti's email logs supply the people, dates, and subjects needed to frame a correspondence request that satisfies the specificity rules. The metadata can therefore provide the information necessary for a later request for the underlying messages.

The amendments also revised statutory fee recovery and the procedures applicable when records are produced after litigation begins. Doherty applies those rules at the drafting, administrative, trial, and appellate stages, so that a request identifies records and custodians precisely enough for an agency to search and for a court to review what comes back.

The Entire Point of a Wi-Fi Lounge

On November 2, 2017, Justin Mills was working on his laptop in the Golden Nugget casino’s Wi-Fi lounge in Atlantic City when a New Jersey State Police encounter began a chain of litigation that would ultimately produce federal rulings that officers had violated his constitutional rights. Detective Sergeant Richard Wheeler — by his own account — had watched Mills do nothing more than use his computer and talk to people nearby before police detained him, searched him, fingerprinted him, filed a charge, and kept his laptop and phone. Seven months later, the Attorney General's office dismissed the charge "in the interests of justice," and his property was returned.

The charge supplied an offense label without explaining what evidence existed, who had made the decision, or why.

In October 2018, Mills asked the State Police for the records documenting what had happened. The custodian sought a two-week extension, then a second. When he sought a third, Mills refused consent. The custodian took another extension anyway. No records came, and no denial either. Delay was doing the work a denial would have had to defend.

Doherty filed a verified complaint that December. The matter reached the Appellate Division as Mills v. State, No. A-5356-18T2 (N.J. Super. Ct. App. Div. Aug. 3, 2020), with Doherty arguing for Mills. Litigation produced what the request alone had not: a court-ordered deadline, a Vaughn index justifying each withheld document, in camera review of the entire investigative file, the two-page State Police report the agency had never turned over — and, under the common law right of access, dozens of additional pages, including a redacted copy of the investigation report Wheeler himself had written.

The records did what records do. They showed who had decided, and on what. In late 2019, Mills filed a federal civil-rights suit.

On August 18, 2021, in Mills v. Golden Nugget Atlantic City, LLC, No. 19-19610 (D.N.J.), Judge Harvey Bartle III held the seizure unconstitutional. "Nothing in these circumstances," the court found, "would lead a reasonable officer to believe he or she had probable cause that illegal activity was occurring or had occurred." As for the conduct that had drawn the police to Mills, the court was direct: it was unreasonable to find probable cause because he "was using his computer in the Wi-Fi Lounge — indeed the entire point of a Wi-Fi lounge." The court denied qualified immunity to Wheeler and to his supervisor, Carl Smallwood — who had made the decision together — and entered summary judgment against both on liability for the unconstitutional seizure, under the Fourth Amendment and, through the New Jersey Civil Rights Act, under Article I of the New Jersey Constitution as well. On December 20, 2021, the court entered summary judgment against both again, this time on liability for the unconstitutional search that followed.

A request the State Police would neither answer nor deny produced the paper trail of police conduct a federal court ruled unconstitutional.

Cases Worth Less Than They Cost

Doherty represents requesters statewide without charging them directly, and seeks statutory fees from agencies when the law permits. Each case must establish both access and the facts supporting discretionary or mandatory fee relief.

For a request involving a modest email log, a meeting recording, a disciplinary file, a settlement agreement, or a copy charge, the economics determine whether a denial is ever tested at all. Public-records law depends on requesters bringing cases whose individual dollar value may be trivial but whose system-wide consequence reaches every request that follows.

No rational person litigates a fifty-cent overcharge for the fifty cents.

And by litigation economics, the Mills records case was a small one. What it set in motion was not.

An Office in West Berlin

Doherty practices from West Berlin, in Camden County, and is licensed in New Jersey, Florida, and Pennsylvania. Alongside public-records work, his practice extends to fair-debt, civil-rights, construction, and appellate matters.

Consultations are free, and he offers home and evening appointments. Civil-rights matters are handled on a contingent basis, while his requester-side public-records work seeks statutory fees from agencies when the law permits.

Why the Small Choices Decide It

Doherty's appeals address complementary questions about the same right. Dugan established how actual copying cost must be measured. Scobolink-O'Neill pressed the difference between physical delivery and a production the requester could review. Rosetti adopted a government-business test for personal-account records and required a certifiable search. And Mills traced what a pried-open file can set in motion: the records that finally explained the police action became the groundwork for federal rulings holding the seizure and ensuing search unconstitutional.

Each ruling supplied directions that custodians, officials, requesters, and judges can apply to later productions, extending its effect beyond the individual dispute that produced it.

His appellate work proceeds from the existing record, the preserved issue, the governing standard, and a remedy a court can administer. The wording of the request, the form used, the objection made, the evidence submitted, and the relief preserved determine which issues and remedies remain available for judicial review.

Most public-records disputes begin with an ordinary person asking for an email log, a meeting recording, three pages of discovery, or a copy from a machine in a county office. The government's answer may turn on a private address, an unfamiliar format, a flat charge, a form field, a search method, or a fee rule.