Guides
General information about Utah law. Not legal advice.
Judicial review and fees
How a records decision gets to district court, what the judge does with it, and who pays for the fight.
A party who loses before the director of the Government Records Office is not finished. Either side, the requester or the governmental entity, may take the decision to district court. The rules below govern that case. What a court case costs is the part most worth reading before filing one.
How long do you have?
A petition for judicial review is filed in district court within 30 days of the director's order. For a requester, asking the Government Records Ombudsman to mediate suspends the deadline while mediation is pending.
§ 63G-2-404(1)(a), (b)What does the judge actually do?
The district court decides the records question de novo, may receive the evidence that was presented to the director, and sits without a jury. The court is not checking the director's work for error; it is evaluating the records request as if it were new.
§ 63G-2-404(6)If you win, can you make the government pay your lawyer?
Only in a narrow case. H.B. 69 (2025), effective May 7, 2025, rewrote the fee provision, and the current rule has four features worth knowing before spending money on a case.
Bad faith has to be shown
Winning is not the whole test. A requester who wins still has to persuade the court that the other side acted in bad faith.
The statute says "defending party," which usually means the agency but can also cover someone else fighting release, like a business protecting its own records.
§ 63G-2-802(3)(a)Cases that mainly help your business
Where the case primarily benefits the requester's financial or commercial interest, the statute says a court "may not award" fees.
The older text said fees "shall not ordinarily be awarded," which left a judge some room. That room is gone.
§ 63G-2-802(3)(c)The risk runs both ways
A court may also order a requester to pay. That takes two things: the defending party winning, and the court finding the requester acted in bad faith.
§ 63G-2-802(5)(a)What you spent before court does not count
Fees and costs from the appeal itself, the hearing and the briefing before the director, are not recoverable. This part was not amended; it is here because it shapes what a win is worth.
§ 63G-2-802(4)What counts as bad faith?
The records law does not say. It requires bad faith and never defines it.
The place a court would look is the general fee law, Utah Code § 78B-5-825. Until 2026 that law was headed “Attorney fees — Award where action or defense in bad faith.”
Then the Legislature passed H.B. 307. Its title says the bill clarifies what bad faith means for attorney fees throughout the code. It did the opposite. It took the phrase out of § 78B-5-825 altogether, heading included, and put a two-part test in its place. A court now awards fees if:
- the claim had no reasonable basis in law or fact, and
- the party brought it to harass, cause delay, run up the other side’s costs, or abuse the process.
H.B. 307 left the records law alone. So one of two things is true, and research for 1A Docket does not find where any court has said which (if you know of a case, send it to us):
- the two-part test above is what requesters now have to prove, or
- the records law points to a phrase that no longer appears in the law it points to.
If it is the first, requesters have to prove two things instead of one: that the agency had no reasonable basis, and why it acted.
The 20-day letter
A court may award a requester fees only for costs incurred 20 or more days after the requester gave the governmental entity an adequate written explanation of the basis for the requester's position. The explanation may be given inside or outside any proceeding.
The consequence is practical: a requester who might ever seek fees should put the basis for their position in writing to the entity as early as possible, because nothing spent in the first 20 days after that letter, and nothing spent before it, counts.
§ 63G-2-802(7)How the rule worked before
To May 7, 2025From GRAMA's early days, § 63G-2-802 let a court assess reasonable attorney fees and costs against the government if the requester substantially prevailed. The provision had teeth: in February 2024, for example, the Third District Court affirmed the committee in the Attorney General calendar litigation and ordered $132,241 in fees to KSL.
This page covers who pays in a records lawsuit. Two other kinds of cases this site tracks, a UPEPA special motion and a vexatious requester petition, have their own rules about who pays, and those rules are different from the ones above. They are explained in What it costs, and who pays. For how an appeal reaches the director in the first place, see The appeal, step by step.