Extract from Doug Austin’s article “To Address Growing FOIA Backlogs, Government Agencies Need to Govern More”
That’s all we need, right, for our government agencies to govern MORE?
Let me explain. We tend to think about government agencies differently from other entities that may have discovery needs and they are different – to a degree. One of the most noticeable differences for Federal government entities from other organizations is their responsibility to respond to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. But even though many government agencies have fully digitized the data being sourced to respond to FOIA requests these days, backlogs for FOIA requests for many of them are growing, not shrinking.
However, some of the best practices for addressing FOIA backlogs come from standard best practices that you can apply to any organization, not just government entities.
Growing FOIA Backlogs
In many cases across Federal government entities, we’re seeing the number of pending FOIA requests grow each year.
