Orchestrating FOIA Technology: A Program, Not Just a Platform

For FOIA practitioners, the past year has been one of the hardest on record. According to the Office of Government Information Services 2026 Report for Fiscal Year 2025, the number of full-time FOIA staff across the fifteen federal government Cabinet-level departments and ten independent agencies fell sixteen percent year over year. Backlogs across those same agencies grew twenty-seven percent. At some agencies the backlog growth was staggering: 679 percent at OPM, 185 percent at NASA, 167 percent at GSA, 131 percent at VA. Request volume keeps climbing. Statutory clocks do not pause for vacant positions.

Anyone who has worked inside a federal FOIA program knows what those numbers feel like in practice. Each request still requires intake, search, review, exemption analysis, redaction, release, and reporting. Each appeal still requires a defensible record. Each piece of litigation still requires producing the trail that explains why the agency did what it did. The work has not gotten easier, and the workforce has gotten smaller.

It is in this environment that Relativity announced general availability of Relativity FOIA on June 1, 2026. The product brings intake, case management, AI-supported review, disclosure, and reporting into a single connected workflow inside RelativityOne Government. For agencies that have lived for years on a patchwork of intake portals, spreadsheets, separate review tools, and manual reading-room exports, the architecture is a meaningful step forward.

A platform is the foundation of a program. But the foundation is not the finished structure. And the gap between the two is where most FOIA programs succeed or fail.

The Operating Reality of Federal FOIA Programs

The OGIS compliance review of the Department of Veterans Affairs, published in FY25, made the shortcomings clear. Among ten findings and fifteen recommendations, OGIS flagged that VA’s technology and systems used to maintain records and process FOIA requests are siloed and not always efficient, with multiple programs unable to communicate with each other. OGIS also found that VA’s decentralized system relies on collateral duty staff, not FOIA professionals, to locate records and process requests, slowing the work. These are not VA-specific problems. They describe the operating reality of most federal FOIA programs.

Purpose-built FOIA software gives agencies the building blocks. The question every agency still has to answer is how to point that capability at their own reality: which custodians map to which components, which routing rules match an org chart that predates the software by a decade, which configuration choices will still hold up in an appeal three years from now. It’s the same work that follows any capable tool into a live, decentralized program, and it’s the work we’ve spent our history doing alongside agencies and programs. A platform this strong deserves an implementation that’s just as deliberate.

The platform makes those decisions possible. Operational design makes them work.

The Downstream Tail

There is another part of FOIA program work that is easy to underweight when evaluating new technology, and it is everything that happens after release.

A FOIA decision is not finished when records leave the building. It is finished when the appeal is exhausted, the litigation is closed, the Inspector General review is complete, and the program officer can answer questions about exemption rationale eighteen months later in front of a fact-finder who was not in the room when the decision was made. AI-supported review changes the shape of that tail. It can make it shorter and more defensible if the audit trail is designed for downstream scrutiny. It can make it longer and harder if the audit trail is designed only for the moment of release.

Confidence scores, explanations, counterpoints, and citations are valuable inside the review workflow. They are also exhibits in the next litigation. Treating them that way from the start changes how programs configure their AI workflows, how reviewers document deviations from AI recommendations, how supervisors validate exemption patterns, and how the agency preserves the record for the General Counsel who will defend it.

This is where practitioner judgment and platform capability meet. The platform produces the artifacts. The program decides what they mean and how they survive challenge.

Orchestration in the Real Federal Environment

The FOIA market has lived for years with a fragmented technology landscape. The OGIS Records Management Self-Assessment found that fewer than one in five agencies reported using AI or machine learning in FOIA processing at all. The Relativity FOIA launch will accelerate that adoption. But adoption is not the same as orchestration.

Orchestration in a federal FOIA context means more than standing up a platform. It means aligning the platform with the agency’s records architecture, statutory reporting obligations under DOJ OIP guidance, decentralized component workflows, existing legal hold and eDiscovery infrastructure, and the long-tail litigation defensibility requirements that determine whether a release stands up. It means treating the platform as one component of a program rather than the program itself.

For most agencies, the day-one reality is not a clean replacement of legacy systems. It is a migration that has to keep statutory reporting accurate, preserve historical case data, integrate with components that operate on different timelines, and retrain a smaller workforce on new tooling without losing the institutional memory that has been holding the program together.

Closing the Gap

Cimplifi has been a Relativity partner since 2013. The same orchestration discipline that has guided work at Cimplifi across eDiscovery, investigations, and contract analytics extends naturally to public disclosure. Cimplifi Innovations brings customization and integration capacity to extend RelativityOne for the workflows agencies actually run.

For agencies evaluating Relativity FOIA, the questions are no longer whether the platform is capable. They are how to configure it for the records environment in front of you, how to integrate it with the systems and statutory reporting that already exist, how to build review workflows that produce defensible records for the appeals and litigation that will follow, and how to operationalize the program with the staff who remain.

FOIA professionals have been carrying a mission that the infrastructure underneath them was not designed to support. The infrastructure is improving. The mission has not gotten easier. Closing the gap between the two is the work ahead.

About the Author
Glenn Melcher is vice president of public sector at Cimplifi and a recognized authority in public sector eDiscovery, with more than 30 years of experience in government investigations, litigation, and information governance.