Florida Attorneys Against Open Government?
A recent law.com article highlights the fact that attorney e-mail addresses are considered public records in Florida – and that a number of attorneys in the Sunshine State are suggesting that public access to these records be limited. As Florida lawyer Stephen Teppler puts it:
“The question becomes ‘what’s a public record?’ A database compilation is not a public record, at least not a public record that is contemplated by the statute. . . What would happen to this data if it weren’t on a computer? You would have 85,000 records. It would be of limited use to a purchaser.”
Um, actually, Stephen, that’s EXACTLY what’s contemplated by the statute (“An agency must provide a copy of the record in the medium requested if the agency maintains the record in that medium.” Fla. Stat. § 119.083(5)).
Advocating that the state purposely make its public records more difficult to access is totally out of line. State governments across the country have an embarrassing record of making public records inaccessible. Foot-dragging, non-responsiveness and the kind of shenanigans suggested by Mr. Teppler are precisely the reason every state has enacted expansive open records requirements.
At the federal level, the backsliding on open access during the Bush administration is what prompted one of President Obama’s first official acts – a memo to the administration essentially requiring agencies to look for reasons to comply with records requests, rather than technical reasons to hold public information back.
Here at Avvo, we’ve made no secret of our fights with recalcitrant states over attorney licensing data. Unfortunately, we still see state courts deploying Bush-league tactics in an effort to avoid transparency of attorney licensing and disciplinary records. Florida is a model for how states should make this information accessible. While attorneys can question whether email addresses are properly part of the public record (although I see no reason why they shouldn’t be), any efforts to place barriers in the way of access to public records should be strongly and loudly resisted.
January 29th, 2009 at 8:17 pm
Hello Josh:
I neither suggest, advocate, nor am in favor of limiting public access to public records. Attorney information is readily available from the Florida Bar without restriction. If you are at all familiar with internet use, you might want to visit the Florida Bar web site, which offers to those who request, and at no cost, licensing, contact, and disciplinary information on every one of Florida’s more than 86,000 lawyers. That said, pre-packaged contact lists, priced at thousands of dollars per clip for targeted commercial advertising and email spammers who can cough up the fees, are not what I think was intended by sunshine laws of Florida. Of course, as the representative of a content aggregator and reseller, I quite understand your commerical bias in favor of same. You might also want to acquaint yourself with the definition of a record in digital format. A record comprises a component of a database, not the database itself.
Steven
January 30th, 2009 at 8:57 am
The concern raised by these Florida attorneys is the sale of email addresses by the bar to spammers. Spam is a subject that raises all sorts of hackles. Having been at the meeting of the committee dicussed in the article I can tell you that these attorneys (me included) do not want access to public records restricted in a wholesale way. They just want to see if there is a way to limit the spam.
February 3rd, 2009 at 3:11 pm
Steve, thanks for reaching out and providing more context. Agreed that selling prepackaged email lists is different than providing them as part of a public records request. While we’re sensitive to any attempts to add friction to the public records request process, the bar needn’t market a package of addresses to those not interested in going through the modest steps of requesting the bar’s public records.