Artificial Intelligence programs are being blamed as the culprit for Chautauqua County needing to increase staffing in its law department.

The Chautauqua County Legislature’s Administrative Services Committee has backed a request from the county Law Department to hire an additional paralegal.

The staffing request will require an additional $105,982 for the budget, which will come from the county’s reserves.

County Attorney Emily Woodard discussed the request for a new paralegal during the committee meeting.

She shared that there are three distinct divisions in her department – corporate counsel, family court and juvenile prosecutions.

Woodard noted the corporate division handles all of the Freedom Of Information Law requests made, which has increased significantly.

“As of today’s date, we are seeing double the amount of FOIL requests that we saw at this time last year,” she said, saying it’s been more than 600 so far this year.

Woodard speculated that the reason for the large increase was “because of the wide use of AI. What people are doing is using Chat GPT or something like that to generate a FOIL request. They can pump them out very quickly and they can access much more information at a quicker pace than what we can keep up with.”

Woodard said this year they have one attorney who spends three to four days a week just processing FOIL requests.

A FOIL is a formal request made to a state, county or local government agency to access public records or documents. It applies to written documents, emails, audio/video files and more. The Post-Journal and OBSERVER have both regularly used FOIL requests when seeking information.

Woodard noted that the county has five days to respond to a FOIL request and 20 days to completely respond to the FOIL request.

Woodard said she believes the information from the FOILs are being used for financial gain. “With the FOIL request, the information is being requested and then used to make a profit. … It’s lucrative. Some people are using it as a way to make ends meet,” she said.

Legislator Lisa Vanstrom, R-West Ellicott, asked Woodard what are the FOIL requests regarding.

Woodard replied, “It’s a little bit of everything.”

Examples she gave included information from high profile criminal cases, emails that have been sent, how a department operates, and how people are paid.

She said there have been times the county has rejected a request, only to have the applicant appeal their decision in court. “We have one right now that’s pending an appeal in the Fourth Department at the Appellate Division,” Woodard said.

Woodard said she and other county attorneys are lobbying together to create a change in the FOIL laws, but she didn’t specify what changes are being sought.

Woodard said they have 10 attorneys in her department, three of which are designated for Family Court. Some of the staff are on medical and personal leave so the corporate council has been asked to fill in.

Woodard said she would like to hire an additional attorney as well, but for now she believes a paralegal could help them for the short term. “Weighing the cost of an attorney to a paralegal and the contributions a paralegal could make, we thought this was a more cost effective consideration,” she said.

The committee unanimously backed the request. The full legislature will vote on the resolution at its next meeting on Wednesday, June 24.