Redacted legal bills leave state taxpayers guessing
HARRISBURG — In May, GOP lawmakers who control the state House and Senate hired the chair of the Republican Party of Pennsylvania to represent them in legal mattersat $575 an hour.
Within three weeks, Lawrence Tabas — one of the state’s top electionlawyers — and his law firm had charged the chambers more than $36,000 for 78 hours of work, records show.
WhatMr. Tabas did for the Legislature,however, is a mystery.
Republican leaders redacted all details about his work from his contract and other public records, continuing into 2021 a stubborn pattern of secrecy surrounding the Legislature’s agreements with private lawyers, an ongoing review by The Caucusand Spotlight PA shows.
In eight cases that began in 2021, or continued to be billed that year, the House and Senate wholly blacked out the reasons for hiring the private law firm, records obtained through a Right-to-Know request show. In other cases, lawmakers drafted the contract with the outside law firms using language so vague that it is impossible to tell whatthe case was about.
In doing so, those leaders have continued to flout a 2013 decision by the state’s highest court that ruled general descriptions of legal services, and the identity of who is beingrepresented, are public information. The Caucus and Spotlight PA areappealing the redactions.
“Where … the taxpayers are footing the bill for the legal services, they are entitled to know the general nature of the services provided for the fees charged,” a panel of Commonwealth Court judges wrote following the state Supreme Court’sdecision.
Legislative leaders spend millions in taxpayer dollars each year to hire private law firms through a closed-door process that, unlike other state contracts, is made with virtually no public oversight. These contracts are regularly awarded to law firms that pour cash into legislators’ campaign coffers, a previous investigationfound.
Notonly do taxpayers pick up the cost for those legal battles — sometimes twice if the cases involve both political parties or separate branches of the government — but they are also paying for legislative leadersto keep details of those fights underwraps.
In 2021, the House and Senate
GOP spent $34,659 to fight attempts by The Caucus and Spotlight PA, under the state’s open records law, to make public critical details in legal bills from prior years.
The top-paid firm fighting the news organizations’ appeal: Philadelphia-based Kleinbard LLC. The company also happens to be one of the eight firms whose reason for being hired is completelyredacted.
In the first nine months of 2021, the Legislature’s legal bills totaled $3.5 million, on par with the roughly $5 million the two chambers have spent annually on lawyers inrecent years.
Some of that money covered continuing costs for litigation in cases that stretch back years, such as the landmark school funding case now playing out in CommonwealthCourt. New legal matters in 2021 included a fight over a state Senate race, a federal investigation into the state’s teacher pension fund, the drawing of new political districts, Gov. Tom Wolf’s mask mandate for schools and the controversial review of the 2020 presidential election championed by Senate Republicans.
Spokespersons for House and Senate Republican leaders declined to answer questions about the newly redacted cases. They have previously defended redactions in legal documents in general by saying the blacked-out information, if revealed, would jeopardize legal strategy or reveal private legal matters that aren’t on a public court docket.
Kleinbard lawyers hired by the Senate to fight an appeal brought by The Caucus and Spotlight PA recently defended the redactions as “limitedand focused.”
“All of the redactions involved legal advice outside of the realm of public knowledge,” the lawyers wrote of the cases paid for by taxpayerdollars.
The Senate paid out nearly $2 million on new legal bills between Jan. 1 and Oct. 15, according to informationprovided to The Caucus and Spotlight PA through a public records request.
Ofthat total, $232,042 went toward cases in which the Senate, in public records, redacted the explanation for thelegal services.
Almost all of that was signed off on by Senate Republicans. The biggest chunk — $119,471 — went to Kleinbard, one of their go-to firms on issues such as elections and constitutional fights. Matt Haverstick, one of the firm’s lead lawyers, declined to comment.
Billing records and engagement letters show that Kleinbard was first hired by the Senate GOP for one mystery case in January 2020, charging between $225 and $775 per hour for its work. In the engagement letter that Senate leaders signed with Kleinbard, they redacted the reason for the firm’s representation. They also blacked out details in billing records.
The records do give some glimpses into how Kleinbard charges for its work. Just under two hours of research cost taxpayers $531. An 18-minute phone call between two of the firm’s lawyers on the case racked up $115.50in February.
Such granular details are also left unredacted in records involving other firms, such as Saxton & Stump, Dilworth Paxson, and McNees, Wallace & Nurick— even as the Senate blacked out the reasons they werehired.
Senate Democrats also redacted the purpose of cases handled by two law firms: Myers, Brier & Kelly, whom they paid $2,000, and Greenberg Traurig, whom they paid$1,140.
In the House, leaders redacted fewer cases. And in one case, they revealed details they had wholly obscuredin years prior.
A previous Caucus and Spotlight PA investigation into the Legislature’s legal bills in 2019 and 2020 showed that the House blacked out 140 pages of bills they paid to Dilworth Paxson. Through other records, the news organizations found the firm was hired to represent the House GOP in the high-profile education funding case now being heard in CommonwealthCourt.
When the news organizations requested bills for the same case in 2021, the House turned over 60 new pages of invoices that did not redact the purpose, revealing that the chamber had previously obscuredthis simple phrase: “education funding litigation.”