An AI FOIA Protocol for Virginians: Putting an End to Ai Yi Yi
A response to Megan Rhyne — and a free protocol for Virginians who want the robot’s help without the robot’s slop.
Megan Rhyne, the Virginia FOIA expert who runs the Virginia Coalition for Open Government, recently sat down for a chat with ChatGPT about FOIA. She came away reaching for the Spanish exclamation of woe: Ai yi yi.
She asked it to draft a request about a special use permit. What came back read like an attorney’s demand in a federal antitrust case: eight numbered categories, each one swollen with “all records reflecting the basis for,” “in connection with,” “and other materials,” “if applicable.” She called it slop.
She is right. But we can do better.
What the chatbot wrote
All records reflecting the review of the application.
Nothing here tells a FOIA officer what goes in the pile.
What the protocol asks for
The staff report to the Planning Commission on SUP-2026-14.
A record type, an office, and a matter. It has an edge you can see.
An AI protocol for Virginia FOIA
I am a Virginia litigator. In litigation, I write the same sort of demands that Rhyne saw. I have trained my AI tools to write those demands for me. That is what works for litigation. And Rhyne is right that it doesn’t often work well for Virginia FOIA.
A discovery request goes to a lawyer who is paid to read it narrowly, so you write broadly; there is a meet-and-confer, a motion to compel, and a judge at the end of the road to sort out what “relating to” means. A FOIA request has none of that apparatus. It has a FOIA officer with a stack of other requests, and no particular reason to guess generously at what you meant.
But I am also a specialist in Virginia FOIA. I write The Virginian’s Guide to FOIA. I have handled hundreds of Virginia FOIA requests and litigated dozens of Virginia FOIA cases — in general district courts, in circuit courts, in the Court of Appeals of Virginia, and in the Supreme Court of Virginia.
I also kinda love AI for my work. I think there is a place for teaching your AI tool how to write a good Virginia FOIA request. So I put together a free AI protocol for drafting Virginia FOIA requests.
What’s an AI protocol?
A protocol is not a form and it is not a template. It is a standing set of instructions you hand the AI assistant before you ask it for anything — closer to the memo you would give a junior minion on “How we do this here” than to a fill-in-the-blank letter.
These models will cheerfully do whatever you ask. The entire trick is telling them what you want before they start.
So I wrote one. It is built out of my book, corrected against Rhyne’s critique, and it runs the whole life of a request. Here is what it tells the machine to do, in order:
-
Go read the law first
Before drafting a word, the assistant has to pull the current text of the Virginia Freedom of Information Act from law.lis.virginia.gov and tell you what version it read. If it cannot search the web, it has to say so in those words rather than quietly working from a memory that may be two years stale.
-
Anchor every item
Each numbered request should be pinned down by at least two of four things:
- What kind of record
- Whose or which office
- What date range
- Which matter
The matter can be the permit number, the project name, or the address.
-
Run the slop check
Before you see a finished letter, the assistant audits its own draft. Could a stranger in that office tell what goes in the pile? Is any item leaning on a soft phrase with nothing underneath it? Is it asking the officer to investigate something? Does this read like a neighbor asking for records, or like a law firm opening a case?
-
Stop and make you read it
The protocol will not present a request as ready to send. It hands you a plain-English summary of what you can probably expect to receive and what the request probably will not reach, and waits. It is also forbidden to guess what your request will cost, because it cannot know — that is what the advance cost estimate in the letter is for.
It goes further than the request
The protocol checks the response against the statute, computes your working-day deadlines, and drafts the follow-up.
If the records are about you — your personnel file, your discipline, your complaint — it routes you to the Government Data Collection and Dissemination Practices Act, Va. Code §§ 2.2-3800 to -3809. That is the quiet lesson of Keil v. O’Sullivan, 925 S.E.2d 326 (Va. 2026): the Supreme Court of Virginia held the deputy had no FOIA remedy for his internal-affairs file, and then held the sheriff had violated the Data Act by withholding it anyway.
And when the conversation turns toward a lawsuit, the protocol stops. It will build you a chronology. It will not draft you a petition.
How to use it, on whatever AI you happen to have
It is plain text on purpose. There is nothing to install, nothing to subscribe to, and nothing of mine to buy.
Turn on web search. Open ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, or whatever else you use, and make sure web browsing or search is on. The first thing the protocol does is go read the Code.
Paste the protocol as your very first message. Copy the whole block and send it before anything else.
Answer its questions. It will ask about a dozen. Short answers are fine.
Keep the conversation open. When the response comes back, return to the same conversation. The later stages assume it can see what you asked for in the first place.
If you expect to file more than one request, do not re-paste it every time. Every major platform has somewhere to park standing instructions — Custom Instructions or a Project in ChatGPT, a Project in Claude, a Gem in Gemini. Drop it there and it applies to every conversation you start.
What it will not do is make the machine a lawyer. It will still make mistakes, and the whole design assumes you will catch some of them. Every citation it hands you should be one you can find yourself at law.lis.virginia.gov. If you cannot find it, it may not exist.
A word to the FOIA officers
If you are the person who opens these, understand that this protocol is written partly for you. It makes the assistant check whether the records are already posted on your website before asking you for them. It caps the request at six items. It tells the requester to include a phone number and to mean it when the letter says “call me and I will narrow this.” It treats your call asking to narrow as good news rather than as an attack, and it tells requesters that most FOIA problems are a misunderstanding or a badly worded request rather than defiance.
That last one is true, by the way. It is just not the part I get hired for.
Get the protocol
Free, plain text, and ready to paste into any AI assistant.
Get the free Virginia FOIA protocolUse it, change it, argue with it.
How to Use It: Copy the Protocol and Paste Into Your AI and hit return. AI will then guide you through a series of questions!
If you are a FOIA officer and a request drafted with it still lands badly on your desk, I would like to hear about it. That is a defect in my instructions, and I would rather fix it than defend it.
Remember that there is a person on the other end of your request, with a workload, judgment, and reasons of their own. No set of instructions, mine included, can make that person answer the way you hoped. The protocol can only help you ask well. The rest is human — which is both the problem and the point.
Megan Rhyne closed her piece by saying that AI promises to make FOIA easier on both sides, that we are not there yet, and that in the meantime we should remember to be human. I would add only this: being human includes leaving better instructions for the machines than “write me a FOIA request.”
Nothing here is legal advice, and reading it does not make me your lawyer. I cannot guarantee outcomes, and you should be wary of anyone who does. These tools also change constantly. What the protocol produces today may look different next month, and what works on one AI tool may not work on another. So check the citations, and read the letter before you send it.
