FIGURE 1 · WHERE THE SEVEN BUSINESS DAYS GO
DAY 1 → DAY 7
Illustrative. The statutory window stays the same. What changes is how much of it is left for custodial judgment.
The friction you already know
Before a custodian can evaluate a single document, someone in your office has to do the following:
Decode It: Does "the last three years" mean three calendar years, three fiscal school years, or three years back from today? Vendor X turns up under three different names in your finance system.
Split It: One raw request becomes separate internal tasks—whether that means routing items across Accounts Payable, IT, and the Superintendent's office in a school district, or across Finance, Zoning, and Public Works in a municipality.
Clock It: Recent contracts and invoices are immediate-access records; anything more than 24 months old isn't. A commercial requester moves the whole request to 14 business days. Add weekends and state holidays, and one request is running several clocks at once.
Hunt for What's Already Public: Searching board packets, council minutes, resolutions, ordinances, and posted archives (whether in BoardDocs or on a municipal site) to see how much of the request is already public.
Flag It: Personal information that has to come out, student records, security-sensitive building details, investigatory material, or a search broad enough to need a clarification letter.
Chase It: Forwarding emails to each department, then following up on each one, repeatedly.
Here's how an example request lands at 4:10 PM on a Thursday, and how it breaks down:
FIGURE 2 · ANATOMY OF ONE "SIMPLE" OPRA REQUEST
"All contracts, invoices, and email correspondence regarding Vendor X, plus any meeting minutes, board packets, or zoning resolutions referencing Project Y, for the last three years."
- Two clocks in one phrase. Only the last 24 months are immediate-access.
- Possibly overbroad. No names or keywords; may need clarifying.
- Three names, one vendor. Vendor X is filed three ways.
- Maybe already public. Often posted in BoardDocs or online.
- Ambiguous range. Calendar, fiscal, or from today?
- Five departments, one email. Every item must be routed and chased.
None of that is custodianship. It's administrative overhead, and it lands on the people who run the district's finances or manage municipal operations.
None of that is custodianship. It's administrative overhead, and it lands on the people who run the district's finances or manage municipal operations.
What is OPRA Triage?
OPRA Triage takes an unstructured OPRA request and turns it into a structured one your request handler can act on at a glance.
Your custodian opens a sorted, organized request instead of a raw email.
15-second demo
Watch one request get triaged
What it does when you're ready for more
We don't ask for full system access upfront. You choose which internal record stores to connect and when, one at a time, using secure, read-only connections. With each connection, OPRA Triage takes on more of the retrieval:
Retrieves Records: Pulls unposted files directly from your connected stores instead of just pointing to them.
Assembles Review Sets: Packages responsive files item by item, with proposed redactions marked for review.
Tracks Across Departments: Follows every open item across departments, so no one has to chase reminders by hand.
Maintains Audit Trails: Keeps a complete log of what was requested, retrieved, reviewed, and approved for release.
Your custodian opens a prepared package, ready for final review.
OPRA Triage removes the administrative labor. Final review and release decisions stay with your custodian.
Send us your hardest recent OPRA request
Try it on your own request
We're opening OPRA Triage to a select group of New Jersey records custodians—across school districts, municipalities, and county administrations. Pick an OPRA request that ate real staff hours in your office, and we'll show you the exact triage package OPRA Triage prepares for it.
Reach out to our team to send us your sample request.