RAHM FAILS TO FULFILL LEGAL BILL VOW
Mayor said he would slash spending on outside firms but has paid about as much as predecessor
Mayor Rahm Emanuel took office in 2011 vowing to slash spending, singling out the multimillion-dollar payments City Hall was making to hire outside lawyers.
Now early in his second term, Emanuel’s promise remains unfulfilled, city records show.
City Hall has paid $110 million to outside lawyers since Emanuel took office— roughly the same it spent under former Mayor Richard M. Daley in his last term.
And despite having an inhouse legal department of 240 attorneys with a personnel budget of $32 million, it appears doubtful City Hall will be able to significantly cut its outside legal expenses anytime soon, according to an analysis of city records that also finds:
The city has paid 14 law firms at least $3 million apiece since 2010, including five for handling police misconduct cases: Hale Law, $14.5 million; Dykema Gossett, $12 million; Rock Fusco & Connelly, $7.4 million; The Sotos Law Firm, $7 million; and Borkan & Scahill, $5.4 million.
The firm Neal & Leroy has been paid $7 million for land acquisition work for O’Hare Airport expansion. Langdon Neal, the firm’s owner, is chairman of the Chicago Board of Elections.
Barnes & Thornburg has been paid $3.3 million since 2012 to handle the city’s unsuccessful lawsuit to break a longterm lease with the politically connected owners of the Park Grill in Millennium Park.
The firm Mayer Brown was paid $487,805 in 2013 for work on Emanuel’s proposed privatization of Midway Airport — plans grounded after one of two bidders withdrew.
Taft Stettinius & Hollister was paid $391,000 this year to help the Emanuel administration’s ongoing effort to win state approval for a city-owned casino. The firm, which merged with Shefsky & Froelich in 2014, drafted legislation for a Chicago casino now under consideration in Springfield. Since 2010, Taft Stettinius and Shefsky & Froelich together have been paid a total of $17.9million.
City officials point out that the mayor inherited nearly 600 police cases from Daley’s tenure. The backlog included wrongful-conviction claims linked to Jon Burge, the former police commander who went to prison for perjury after being accused of overseeing the torture of dozens of black men to get confessions.
Last year, the city spent $28.1 million on private attorneys— the most it’s spent in a single year in a decade. Fortytwo percent of that — $11.9 million— was for police cases, according to interviews and records. Altogether, the city has paid $61.5 million since 2011 to defend claims against police officers.
In the first eight months of this year, the city paid $14.3 million to outside attorneys. If things continue at that pace, the city would finish the year at $21.5 million, the lowest since 2007’s $20.5million.
The city is referring fewer police misconduct cases to outside counsel — about 40 a year versus 205 in 2010, Daley’s last full year in office.
Also, City Hall has added 10 in-house attorneys— paid $46 an hour on average, versus up to $295 for private attorneys — to handle police cases.
And the city has gotten top firms to work for free or at a reduced cost, saving taxpayers $22 million since 2011, according to city estimates.
“The changes are starting to pay off,” says Steve Patton, Emanuel’s top City Hall attorney. “We will see a reduction.”
Among pending high-profile lawsuits the city has used outside counsel for:
A suit filed by James Kluppelberg, who spent nearly 25 years in prison on charges he set a fire that killed a woman and five children in Back of the Yards. His conviction was reversed in 2012. He says detectives working under Burge tortured him to falsely confess. Attorneys have billed formore than $2.2million in the case.
The case of Jacques Rivera, who spent 20 years behind bars for the 1988 killing of a Humboldt Park teenager. Released after the sole eyewitness recanted, he sued in 2012, claiming ex-Detective Reynaldo Guevara and other officers forced the witness to identify him. The city has paid attorneys more than $2 million.
A suit filed by Carl Chatman accusing the police of withholding evidence and forcing him to confess to raping a Daley Center clerk in 2002. He spent 11 years in prison before prosecutors had his conviction set aside. Taxpayers have paid Dykema Gossett $253,996 this year to represent the city.
City officials say it’s necessary to bring in outside lawyers in complicated matters such as the Park Grill case. With 11 attorneys, the law department’s commercial ligation group “simply does not have the resources to litigate a case (and trial) of this magnitude, which involved more than 40 depositions and more than 70 days of trial,” a spokeswoman says.
$110 million The amount City Hall has paid to outside lawyers since Rahm Emanuel took office $28.1 million The amount the city spent last year on private attorneys — the most it has spent in one year in a decade. $61.5 million The amount the city has paid since 2011 to defend claims against police officers.