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Passed in 1966 as a way to bolster government transparency, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) gives the public the right to access information from the federal government. As a result, federal agencies must be able to conduct electronic discovery for records being requested by individuals and private parties under FOIA. When the law was passed, few could have imagined its impact. Today, many government agencies are struggling just to keep up with the constant barrage of FOIA requests, with some facing request backlogs in the tens of thousands.
It’s not just federal agencies that are caught in the FOIA maelstrom. Every state has public records laws which allow members of the public to obtain documents and other public records from state and local government bodies. Though not identical to FOIA, many of these state laws were modeled after the federal law. In fact, several state courts have held that federal judicial interpretations of FOIA are helpful in interpreting similar language in state public record laws.
Download Exterro’s newly updated whitepaper Overcoming FOIA Challenges today.
Though governed by an entirely different set of rules and requirements as civil litigation and eDiscovery, FOIA requests involve many of the same requirements, processes, and challenges. However, many government agencies lag well behind their private sector counterparts when it comes to adopting more efficient processes and more advanced technologies for searching, retrieving, reviewing, and producing relevant data.
Statistics surrounding FOIA requests are staggering and underscore the significant impact the law is having today. According to the government’s official FOIA website, there were over 1.7 million (specifically 1,707,197) total requests in Fiscal Year 2025, the most recent year with complete reporting, and over 72,000 of them went unfulfilled (with 1,635,055 requests processed). What’s more, the backlog for FOIA requests is now 339,671 requests, a 27% increase over the previous fiscal year. (Government FOIA reports can be accessed at https://www.justice.gov/oip/reports-1.)
Besides the general increase in information requests, government agencies are also under pressure to be more transparent and respond to FOIA requests in a timelier manner. In general, the FOIA requires an agency to respond to FOIA requests within 20 business days after the office that maintains the responsive records receives the request. That means that within four working weeks, teams must search all the data they hold for relevant information, retrieve it, review it for any extraneous information that might be a violation of another person’s or entity’s privacy rights, redact it, and produce it to the requesting party.
Although governed by different legal frameworks and rules, eDiscovery for civil litigation and Freedom of Information Act requests share several core requirements, processes, and challenges:
Modern eDiscovery technology can provide powerful capabilities that can improve the efficiency and defensibility of FOIA responses capable of weathering even the largest surges in demand, because it is engineered to perform these tasks as scale, defensibly, across vast amounts of data.
Some specific ways advanced e-discovery technology can support FOIA activities include:
Larger federal agencies have dozens of regional and district offices that are all subject to FOIA demands. Having a common or shared technology solution from which FOIA activities can be centrally initiated and managed supports better resource allocation and greater efficiency. When the process and technologies are consistent across the entire agency, it’s much easier to shift people from one project to another since they don’t need to be trained up on an entirely new system.
FOIA requests can involve a very small set of relevant materials or many thousands of documents depending on the nature of the request. Bound by search tools designed only to analyze collected data, government agencies often struggle estimating the size of a given request without first conducting a collection, which inevitably pulls in a lot of irrelevant documents. More advanced in-place search technologies allow for basic queries and even some advanced searching within data sources, without actually collecting any data. Understanding potential data volumes early on helps agencies budget, plan, and target only the data that needs to be collected.
Nothing increases the duration of a FOIA project more than manually redacting exempted information from each individual document. Document review technology can automate the redaction process by identifying patterns in documents that relate to exempted information. For example, the tool can automatically detect a numerical pattern consistent with a social security number and redact all instances of that pattern across an entire document set. Done manually, such work would take many hours, or even days, to complete and still result in oversights.
To learn other ways e-discovery technology can help, click the link below to download our recent whitepaper, Overcoming FOIA Challenges.
