County’s Lawyer Fees Detailed

Los Angeles County has spent nearly $100 million in the last three years on legal fees for private attorneys, an amount that could be trimmed by using outside auditors to search for inappropriate billings, according to a report from the county counsel’s office.

The report, requested by the Board of Supervisors two weeks ago, lists at least 98 law firms that regularly defend the county in health, welfare, personal injury and law enforcement cases, and represent the county on bond sales.

The amount paid out to private firms has declined, from $36 million in fiscal year 1992-93 to $31 million the next year and $29 million for the last fiscal year that ended June 30, the report showed.

At least four firms received more than $1 million each during the last fiscal year, the report showed. The leading moneymaker during the last fiscal year was Parker, Milliken, Clark O’Hara & Samuelian, which received $1.26 million. Other firms that received more than $1 million were Manning, Marder & Wolfe; Morris, Polich & Purdy, and Serritella & Paquette.

Another perennial top money getter was Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue--Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke’s former law firm--which was paid $1.2 million over an 18-month period for mostly bond work, according to the report. Burke could not be reached for comment.

In an interview, County Counsel DeWitt Clinton III said the report explains what safeguards are in place to make sure the county is getting its money’s worth.

Clinton estimated that aggressive monitoring has reduced billings in the last three years by as much as 10%. Overall costs have dropped by 20% as well, but Clinton said some of that can be attributed to lower caseloads.

Clinton, however, said his staff rarely scrutinizes the many itemized invoices that detail reimbursements sought by private law firms. Bringing in outside auditors to pore over the bills on a random basis, he said, could detect problems similar to those uncovered in an audit of one of the county’s largest outside law firms last year.

Although refusing to provide details of that audit, Clinton said the county no longer does business with the firm, which it had relied on for many large personal-injury cases filed against the county. “We simply went in and found things that we thought were not right,” Clinton said.

In the report, Clinton said such use of outside auditors should be limited, and only for “further fine tuning and augmenting the county’s program.”

At least one county official said he was unhappy with the lack of detail in the report.

“I think this [report] leads to one inescapable conclusion. . . . We spend more on outside law firms that we do in-house, and that is hugely unusual for a government of this size,” said Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky. “It is incumbent on us to evaluate this, to make sure we are getting what we pay for.”

Yaroslavsky said he plans to ask supervisors to approve a pilot program, in which outside auditors selectively look at the individual billings of several law firms, or at several cases, “to make sure we are not being taking for a ride by outside firms that run the clock on us.”

Yaroslavsky called for the report after a Times article detailed potential irregularities in $1.3 million in bills that outside law firms had charged the city of Los Angeles to represent Councilman Nate Holden in sexual harassment suits. Included in those bills were $12,700 for photocopies, $11,000 for messenger services--and $3,139.66 for after-hours air conditioning.

Yaroslavsky said he was concerned about other, broader issues after reading the county counsel report Tuesday, such as why so much of the county’s legal workload was contracted out to private firms.

Clinton said that the outside firms are hired because his staff already has too much work to do, and that they provide expertise his staff lacks.

And, citing an independent audit last year and a county auditor-controller report from 1994, Clinton noted that his office has proven that it does a good job of monitoring general bills submitted by outside counsel.