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. In 2026, Donald M. Doherty Jr. persuaded New Jersey’s highest court that it does not change the public character of the record either.

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 the messages passed through official or personal accounts. The Board produced a redacted log from accounts it controlled. The production showed public business traveling toward private addresses.

The Board refused to produce logs from those personal accounts. Its position joined law to technology: private accounts were outside the District’s possession, officials could not be required to surrender their private correspondence, and consumer email systems did not necessarily generate the same automated report as the Board’s server.

Doherty represented Rosetti through the trial court, Appellate Division, and New Jersey Supreme Court. His argument did not depend on making a private inbox public in full. It depended on separating the account from the government business conducted inside it.

The Log before the Email

An email log records the message’s surrounding data: sender, recipient, time, subject, and attachments. Those details often show a requester which emails to seek next.

Without the log, a member of the public may know that officials discussed a contract, appointment, superintendent, meeting, or policy but lack the dates and participants needed to formulate a sufficiently specific request. The log identifies the dates and participants before the requester seeks the underlying messages and before exemptions or redactions are litigated.

Rosetti therefore reached beyond one school-board dispute. It concerned the preliminary information necessary to use the records law at all. A public official who forwards official business to a personal address moves both the message and its indexing information out of the system a custodian ordinarily searches.

Rosetti and Personal Email Accounts

Doherty represented Alex Rosetti through the Appellate Division and New Jersey Supreme Court in a dispute over public business conducted through school-board members’ personal email accounts.

On June 11, 2026, the Supreme Court held that emails remain government records when officials conduct public business through personal accounts and that logs of those messages are public records as well. The court protected unrelated personal correspondence while requiring a search confined to government-related communications.

Certified Searches under OPRA

The Supreme Court also addressed how an agency proves that the search occurred. Board members must examine the locations where responsive messages may exist, including inboxes, sent folders, trash, and other folders used for the relevant business. They must identify a search method capable of finding government-related messages and 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, terms or methods used, folders reviewed, and limits encountered. If official-account logs show messages sent to a private address while the private-account search produces nothing, the certification gives the requester and the judge a place to test the discrepancy.

The Court did not require the District 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.

The opinion ended with a practical instruction to government bodies: tell officials not to use personal accounts for public business. During oral argument, Doherty stated the same rule more bluntly—“There is no acceptable reason for discussing government business through private email accounts. None.” The court required agencies to ensure that official work remains searchable, certifiable, and available through public-records requests.

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. The trial court dismissed under a separate fee statute. In 2005, the Appellate Division reversed and remanded.

The court held that OPRA governed copies made through the clerks’ self-service machines. Under the governing public-access principles, 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.

Dugan established that self-service copy charges under OPRA must be tied to actual reproduction costs and returned the class claims for further proceedings.

The sum at stake in 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.

Five Cents, Seven Cents, and Actual Work

Current OPRA states the ordinary printed-copy schedule precisely: five cents for a letter-size page or smaller and seven cents for a legal-size page 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 cannot be completed through ordinary copying. An agency may impose a reasonable special-service charge when the format, volume, collation, technology, or manipulation requires extraordinary time or work. The custodian must explain and itemize the charge before incurring it. The requester may object.

The amended law now gives the proposed charge a rebuttable presumption of reasonableness and places the burden on the requester to show otherwise. That is a different dispute from Dugan’s self-service copier. It requires evidence about the actual task: which employees will perform it, at what rate, for how long, using what system, and why ordinary production will not suffice.

The lawful charge depends on its category and its connection to the work the statute permits the agency to recover.

Accessible Formats Under OPRA

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

Physical delivery does not provide functional access when the format requires unavailable equipment, proprietary software, or a conversion the requester cannot perform. Current OPRA requires production in the requested medium when the agency maintains the record that way. If a requested conversion is available without substantial manipulation or third-party work, the agency must perform it and may charge the permitted cost. Where substantial programming is necessary, different duties and charges apply.

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

The 2024 Law Changed the Bargain

New Jersey’s 2024 amendments changed the drafting and economics of an OPRA case. A request now must use the agency’s adopted form or include all information required by it. A correspondence request must identify the job title or accounts to be searched, a specific subject, and a reasonable period. One submission may be directed to no more than one agency. The requester must disclose whether the records will be used for a commercial purpose.

Those details affect the first document in the case. A request that asks for “all emails about school business” without naming accounts, subject, or period may fail before the government searches anything. Rosetti’s logs matter in this environment because metadata can supply the people, dates, and subjects needed for a later request that satisfies the statute’s specificity rules.

The amendments also changed attorney-fee recovery. A requester who prevails may receive a reasonable fee. A court or the Government Records Council must award one when the agency unreasonably denied access, acted in bad faith, or knowingly and willfully violated OPRA. If an agency produces the record within seven business days after litigation begins, the matter may be dismissed without prejudice, with a possible fee when the custodian knew or should have known the denial violated the law.

The amendments retained fee awards but made the enforcement structure more conditional. Doherty represents requesters statewide without charging them directly and seeks statutory fees from agencies when the law permits. The case must establish access and the facts supporting discretionary or mandatory fee relief.

For a request involving a modest email log, meeting recording, disciplinary file, settlement agreement, or copy charge, the economics can determine whether a denial is ever tested. Public-records law depends on private requesters bringing cases whose individual dollar value may be tiny but whose effect reaches every later request.

Dugan, Constantine, and Rosetti

Dugan addressed county-clerk copy charges. Rosetti established that public business conducted through a private email account can remain subject to disclosure and defined a search procedure. Constantine clarified how to challenge municipal-court copy charges.

In Rosetti, Doherty secured recognition that government-related messages remain public records even when sent through a private account, while unrelated private correspondence remains protected.

Doherty focuses on the request’s wording, the form used, the fee charged, the objection made, and the relief preserved.

The Ordinary Request

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. Each sounds administrative. Each determines whether access works.

He focuses public-records disputes on verifiable questions: what record exists, who must search, what format can be produced, what the agency may charge, and which statute supplies the remedy.