Why the City hires outside counsel

A new RG4N talking point that popped up in the comments on this Chronic blog:  If RG4N's suit was really meritless, the City of Austin should have handled the lawsuit in-house instead of "wasting" hundreds of thousands of dollars hiring Casey Dobson.

This is silly, and anyone who knows anything about the practice of law knows it.  It is utterly routine for the City to hire outside counsel.  Just check out past City Council agendas (accessible here).  I chose six meetings at random and the retention or payment of outside counsel was on the agenda in four of them:

1. June 21, 2007 (authorizing payment to Cox Smith Matthews for the Harry Whittington lawsuit);
2. February 1, 2007 (contract with Scott, Douglass & McConnico relating to design and construction issues with airport parking garage);
3. December 7, 2006 (contract with Bickerstaff, Heath, Smiley, Pollan, Kever & McDaniel relating to ABIA expansion);
4. November 16, 2006 (authorizing a total contract amount of $1,575,000 to Brown, McCarroll for advice on water supply issues).

The Northcross arrangement is nothing special.

There are two reasons the City relies on outside counsel.

First, the City's attorneys already have plenty of stuff to do.  The City doesn't have attorneys on staff who can drop everything they're doing to spend most of their time litigating a single case.

A lawsuit can eat up hundreds of hours of attorney time even when it's a loser.  For example, it's not unusual in products-liability litigation for tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to be spent responding to "expert" technical opinions that are eventually rejected as junk science by the judge.  Judges don't like to decide things until they think both parties have had a complete opportunity to make their cases.

Second, and more importantly, the legal profession is now extremely specialized, and the City does not keep enough attorneys on staff to cover all areas of specialization.  Land-use litigation like the Northcross suit is a specialty. Condemnation litigation is a specialty.  Negotiating complex master development agreements is a specialty.  There are many, many other specialties that the City needs from time to time.

Theoretically, the City could maintain a large staff of specialized attorneys to handle every contingency.  But the City does not have a constant need for all of these specialized services; it fluctuates. Most of the time these attorneys would be sitting in their offices throwing paper airplanes at each other but still drawing a salary. 

It is more economical for the City to use outside counsel to ramp up its legal expertise and resources as events warrant.  It gives the City flexibility, in other words.  And virtually every other entity that is frequently involved in litigation follows the same practice.

Comments

[M1EK]

Well explained. Suggest you post to the austinbloggers portal...