Supervisors voted to fire one outside law firm in favor of a
less-expensive one in yet another attempt to trim ever-increasing
fees
Hollister – After spending more than $3 million over the last five years on private lawyers, the county is taking steps to trim its legal bills by firing a firm that charges close to $400 per hour and replacing it with one that charges a fraction of that rate.
The Board of Supervisors fired Redwood City firm Fish & Richardson, which represented the county in several high-profile cases, during a closed-door meeting last week, in what supervisors called a cost-saving maneuver. The firm, represented by attorney John Picone, charged nearly $400 an hour, according to county sources. The board opted to drop Fish & Richardson in favor of its insurance law firm, Rankin, Landsness, Lahde, Serverian and Stock, which is significantly cheaper with an hourly rate of $160, according to Supervisor Anthony Botelho.
Botelho said while the switch results in a significant drop in price, he believes the quality of litigation should remain the same.
“We have to bring in our outside litigation costs because it does have a direct impact on such things as public safety, staffing for the DA’s office and a number of other areas,” Botelho said. “They (Rankin) should have been assigned these cases to begin with. Why that didn’t happen with the previous board, I don’t know. But it robs from every other department in the general fund.”
The board has attempted to rein in outside attorney fees after watching the county’s coffers being drained by legal bills for cases ranging from the Los Valientes lawsuit to the nine-year-long Sandman case. In May, the board approved a policy which requires the county counsel’s approval before any department head hires a lawyer or seeks legal advice.
Since April of 2000, the county has spent more than $3 million on outside lawyers. By comparison, Yuba County, with a population slightly higher than San Benito’s, spends approximately $20,000 a year on private lawyers, according to the county’s auditor.
But the county has paid Picone almost $75,000 over the past year to defend the board against several high-profile lawsuits, according to county financial records obtained by the Free Lance through the California Public Records Act.
District Attorney John Sarsfield, whose office worked closely with Picone on several of the cases, has no problem with the county trying to cut costs. However, he is upset the board changed direction without notifying him before the decision was made – especially because Picone is leading the defense in a lawsuit that names Sarsfield and the county.
“The decision was made without any input at all from me, and while they don’t have to do it that way, I would have liked to be consulted,” Sarsfield said. “With my name on this thing I wanted to be consulted and I don’t think that’s an unreasonable request.”
Sarsfield said he has no problem with the county’s choice in less expensive law firms, and Botelho said he reiterated his confidence in the Rankin firm to the prosecutor.
“We assured Mr. Sarsfield that he’ll be adequately defended and we have every intention of being aggressive and protecting his position,” Botelho said.
Picone was defending the county, Sarsfield and Sheriff Curtis Hill in an alleged invasion of privacy suit brought by Jacqueline Stafford-Pelt, a former Hollister resident and daughter of local private investigator Dennis Stafford.
Stafford-Pelt sued the county and its top law enforcement officials more than a year ago after Hill and Sarsfield held a press conference in September of 2003, where they disseminated old police reports which included Stafford-Pelt’s name and identified her as a victim of a sex crime, according to her attorney, Pat Marshall.
Between August 2004 and May of this year, the county paid Picone more than $55,000 in attorney’s fees in connection with the Stafford-Pelt case, according to county financial records. In June, a Federal Court judge in San Jose denied a motion Picone made to dismiss Stafford-Pelt’s case, Marshall said. The case will go to an evaluation stage in early September, where Marshall said a settlement could be reached. He declined to attach a dollar figure to the suit.
“There’s always a possibility. A lot of it depends on the reasonableness of the parties,” Marshall said, also saying that his client was flexible to several options. “I have my concerns with the other side, though.”
Hill said County Attorney Claude Biddle recommended to him that they switch law firms and was OK with the change.
“I don’t know the ramifications of switching from one to the other,” Hill said. “He (Biddle) asked if I’d be amenable to a change of counsel, and I didn’t have any problem with it.”
The District Attorney’s Office also used Picone as the lead attorney in a criminal grand jury indictment of Los Valientes attorney Michael Pekin. The grand jury returned an indictment of five felonies against Pekin, which a judge dismissed in its entirety in June. Picone also defended the county in a $5 million lawsuit against the county and former Supervisor Ruth Kesler filed by current Supervisor Jaime De La Cruz for alleged racial discrimination. De La Cruz later dropped the suit.
Lawsuits against the county which are still pending include one brought by Pekin against former Supervisor Richard Scagliotti alleging governmental corruption, and a nine-year-old civil suit filed against the county by a mining operation, Sandman, disputing officials’ attempts to restrict the company’s use of its 100-acre property along the San Benito River.
Erin Musgrave covers public safety for the Free Lance. Reach her at 637-5566, ext. 336 or [email protected]
