How Fairfax County Government Turns Around 90% of FOIA Matters in Under an Hour

Fairfax County, Virginia sits across the Potomac from Washington, D.C. It’s the most populous county in Virginia, home to more than a million residents. That scale shows up in every part of the County’s operations, and lately it’s been most visible in the volume of public records requests landing on its information security team.

The Challenge

A Records Surge That Won’t Slow Down

Fairfax County receives nearly 20,000 FOIA requests a year, a rate that’s increased roughly 200% in recent years. And it keeps climbing.

“Every month in 2026 has been the highest month of FOIA requests on record, and it just keeps going up.” Steve Hong, Information Security Analyst, Fairfax County Government

All-time records are the kind of thing you like to hear about in sports, not your FOIA queue. The surge isn’t a fluke, and it’s happening across the country at the local, state, and federal levels. Hong attributes this surge to two compounding factors:

• The average constituent is more aware of FOIA processes than ever before, because of high-profile record stories moving through the news cycle. Whenever government record cases gain traction, more people learn they can request government records too, and curiosity translates directly into volume.

• Generative AI tools have made it dramatically easier to figure out how to submit a FOIA request — no more combing through outdated local government websites — and even easier to draft one. That lowers the friction on the front end and lifts the volume on Fairfax County’s end.

“More people have been learning about FOIA, especially with the Epstein files. People have been learning that they can go to the government and request these files. But also with AI, a lot of that’s starting to play in that domain as well.” Steve Hong, Information Security Analyst, Fairfax County Government

Hong and his team have also seen requesters use AI on the other side of the exchange, contesting the productions the County sends back by prompting AI agents to identify legal angles or procedural openings that keep a matter alive.

Even in a large county, these requests land on a very small team. On a busy week, FOIA-related collections can consume 80% of Hong’s time. He cited a two-week stretch in March of 2026 where he had to pause all other work to handle a large influx of FOIA requests.

How Logikcull Helps

Trusting the Data From the Jump

For FOIA requests, Hong primarily collects from the County’s Microsoft environment and, to do so, he relies on Microsoft’s native collection software. But Purview’s output, on its own, isn’t something the team fully trusts or can hand to a FOIA officer, agency reviewer, or requester.

It’s sprawling, difficult to read, unorganized, full of duplicates, and flat out doesn’t meet the production standards Fairfax needs for FOIA. So, the team drags and drops every Purview export into Logikcull to assess its volume, deduplicate it, filter it, sort it, and shape it into a format anyone can actually work with.

The team has also leaned on Logikcull as a check on Purview itself. When they need to confirm whether an email was actually sent or remained in a draft, or whether a search truly returned zero results, they skip Purview’s native interface and re-validate inside Logikcull.

The same logic guides how the team handles narrower “to and from” requests. Rather than filter at the Purview level, they pull the full mailboxes into Logikcull and apply the filtering there, because they trust what they see.

“The accuracy in Logikcull is really great. The details it provides, and its ease of use allows us to do more with Purview’s export and establishes trust in the output we provide.” Steve Hong, Information Security Analyst, Fairfax County Government

That trust, earned across thousands of matters, sets the tone for everything downstream.

Cutting Review Volume By 67% With Inclusive Email Detection

Fairfax’s Purview exports are commonly a bundle of duplicative email threads. Email, as an unstructured data source, is naturally repetitive. A single conversation between ten people generates dozens of overlapping records, each with fragments of the same content. It’s difficult to sort, tricky to understand, and unnecessarily time-consuming to review.

To avoid that time suck, Fairfax uses Logikcull’s Inclusive Email Auto Tag to pinpoint only the emails needed to capture 100% of the unique content in a thread, tagging the rest as duplicates.

On the largest project currently sitting in Hong’s Logikcull workspace, Inclusive Email cut the project’s gigabyte volume by 67% and the page count by more than 99%.

• Before Inclusive Email: 59.4 GB across 11 million pages.

• After Inclusive Email: 19.4 GB across roughly 21,000 pages.

All of that reduction happens before a reviewer touches a single document. By reducing review volumes by two thirds from the jump, Fairfax keeps up with an increasingly high number of requests, and even with record-breaking months.

Scoping Matters With Early Case Assessment

Once Inclusive Email does the heavy lifting, Hong runs preliminary early case assessment, pulling updated document, page, and spreadsheet counts. Those numbers give downstream reviewers a clear picture of what they’re about to open and give the FOIA office an accurate basis for cost estimates to the requester.

Essentially, Logikcull cleans out the fridge (Purview) tossing expired items, eliminating duplicates, and labeling what’s left, so by the time a reviewer opens the door, they know exactly what’s on the shelves.

Producing in a Few Clicks

The County’s FOIA office, housed in the Office of Public Affairs, handles intake, scopes each request, and crafts the keywords and date ranges that define a given search. Once that scope hits Hong’s desk, the workflow collapses into a handful of clicks.

“For the most part, it’s just upload into Logikcull, select inclusive email, send over the document and page count. And normally it’ll be small enough that we’re good to go and produce it. So, we’ll just sort it by family date, hit download PDF, and send it over.” Steve Hong, Information Security Analyst, Fairfax County Government

That simple click sequence — upload, dedupe, count, sort, export — accounts for 90% of the matters that come through Hong’s team. The whole loop, from receiving keywords to delivering a production back to the FOIA office, takes about an hour.

For a team facing nearly 20,000 requests a year, that throughput is what makes the job possible.

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Connecting a Decentralized County

Decentralized government is key for checks and balances, but it can be tricky for IT efficiency and cross-collaboration. At Fairfax County, each agency — the police, family services, attorney’s office — operates with its own IT function. That structure can hide a tool working well in one corner of the county from another entirely.

Logikcull broke the pattern. The County attorney’s office brought the platform in, and since then use has expanded steadily across departments. Now, teams run HR investigations, internal audits, and litigation matters all through the same Logikcull pipeline.

At this point, seven different departments across the County use Logikcull, and it’s so popular that they created a Teams channel to swap tips and tricks.

“We created a Teams group of Logikcull users, so it just provides an opportunity to build that collaboration.” Steve Hong ,Information Security Analyst, Fairfax County Government

When matters call for cross-agency work, Logikcull connects the dots. Hong’s team uploads a Purview export, runs the analysis, and can share the project directly into another agency’s Logikcull account for further review.

The platform helps each team — the FOIA office, family services, information security — with their unique use cases yet keeps them working together in a shared language, with shared confidence in the output.

The Results

Lean Team, Record-Breaking Volume, Steady Throughput

In the face of the FOIA surge, Fairfax remains a lean team. Yet they continue to clear a workload that has roughly tripled in a few years, with the help of a platform that handles the parts of the job that scale poorly with human effort.

The results land across every part of the workflow:

• 67% reduction in document volume through Inclusive Email auto-tagging.

• One-hour turnaround on roughly 90% of matters, from collection to production.

• Higher accuracy than Microsoft Purview, validated across thousands of matters.

• One platform across use cases — HR investigations, internal audits, and county litigation, not just FOIA — standardizing how Fairfax handles sensitive collections.

• A cross-agency community of users trading workflows, features, and best practices across county departments.

• Steady throughput against a 200% surge in FOIA requests, with every month in the last year setting another record.

Logikcull gives a small team the ability to absorb a tide that would otherwise drown them. It converts Purview’s raw output into something a FOIA officer can actually act on. It earns a cybersecurity team’s confidence in the data they produce, the costs they estimate, and the records they stand behind. And it stitches a decentralized county government into a shared community of practice, so no single team shoulders the burden of transparency alone.

That’s why Logikcull exists.