When Matthew Topic first left Kirkland & Ellis to launch his open-records practice at the Chicago plaintiffs boutique Loevy & Loevy in March 2014, it was just him and a single paralegal working part-time on three Illinois Freedom of Information Act cases.

A lot has changed since then. Working alongside five lawyers and paralegals, Topic is now juggling 200 FOIA cases, mostly in Illinois and federal courts, although he has been "dabbling" in FOIA cases in other states, such as Florida and Alabama.

He's waded into national-scale fights over records: Topic and his firm represented journalists who obtained the dashcam video showing a white Chicago police officer shooting a black teenager 16 times, as well as the records and notes used by Robert Mueller in his special counsel investigation into the Trump campaign's interactions with Russia during the 2016 presidential election.

Topic and BuzzFeed News scored a major victory last month when the U.S. Department of Justice agreed to release batches of those reports. But they'll only be released 500 pages a month every month for at least the next eight years, according to BuzzFeed News.

"There's just a rampant problem, especially DOJ and its components, about not even remotely meeting the guidelines under the statute," Topic said. "Getting into these cases where you have production schedules that go out five or 10 years."

Chris Hickman, BuzzFeed's senior counsel for media and intellectual property, said the major open-records victories the publication has won over the past year are "thanks in no small part to the effectiveness of Matt Topic."

Topic owes his high-volume practice to a particular quirk of FOIA statutes at the federal level and in states like Illinois: If a plaintiff prevails in court against a public agency over a FOIA matter, the public agency has to foot the bill for all of the attorney fees the plaintiff spent.

"This is why there's fee-shifting in the statute," Topic said. "I honestly believe I'm fulfilling what the [Illinois] General Assembly had in mind when they made for fee-shifting. No one was really taking advantage of it in a systematic, widespread way."

This means that Topic is flexible on fees. If his clients can pay, they'll pay. If they can't, "that won't be an obstacle to bringing a case." He said he would rather take on 20 cases where no one can pay than one case where a client could pay.

Take the city of Chicago, a frequent target of the journalists and transparency advocates Topic represents. Loevy & Loevy raked in $169,000 in attorney fees for FOIA actions against Chicago in 2018 alone, according to city records; the year before that it was $123,475.

"I consider this to be a personal mission. This is more than just a business or a practice," Topic said. "Every time the government improperly withholds records, it makes me angry, and I feel compelled to do something about it if I can."

His business model requires patience, because Topic and his team typically don't get paid until the case is resolved. He has cases pending for the next 10 years, and he thinks there's room to add more lawyers to his team to further increase the volume.

"We've shown that it works as a business model, or at least it works for us, and there's no reason continuing to increase the volume wouldn't work," Topic said.

It was during his tenure at Kirkland & Ellis, where he was a partner, that Topic began working on FOIA cases. Illinois lawmakers in 2009 updated the state FOIA to allow plaintiffs to recover attorney fees. It was because of that change that Topic, an intellectual property lawyer, developed the business model for his FOIA practice. That's how he landed at Loevy & Loevy in 2014.

A year after jumping to Loevy & Loevy, a firm known for securing multimillion-dollar jury verdicts and settlements in civil rights cases, Topic began working the biggest case of his career—an independent journalist was trying to obtain the video that depicted the death of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald by Chicago police officers.

In a major FOIA victory for Topic, a Cook County judge ordered the release of the McDonald video—which showed an officer shooting McDonald 16 times—in November 2015, creating a political earthquake whose reverberations can still be felt today in Chicago.

Topic doesn't consider himself a traditional media lawyer. Although he is the outside general counsel for the Chicago-based Better Government Association, a nonprofit watchdog organization that partners with news outlets in the Windy City, he doesn't handle a lot of defamation cases. And not all of his clients are journalists.

He admitted he doesn't have a good sense of the analytics of his practice—how many victories he and his team win at trial, how many hours they pour in. He said he is hoping to keep better tabs on those details in 2020.

Although Topic and his team have taken up FOIA cases in other states, they're not looking to extend the main reach of their high-volume practice outside of Illinois and the federal level. One obstacle to that expansion is that each state has a different FOIA statute with its own quirks.

"Every state, it operates a little bit differently, so there's a bit of a learning curve," Topic said. "That day may come where we start to look and say, 'Let's pick some other states and get people on the ground in those states.' Or maybe we look at partnerships…"

"Right now, there's so much more we haven't even done in Illinois and federal that, as we're constituted now, is pretty full-time," he added.