City Hall’s tab for private lawyers nearly $22 million last year
BY TIM NOVAK AND ART GOLAB Staff Reporters tnovak@suntimes.com April 8, 2013 12:14AM
Thaddeus Jimenez (left) and his mother Victoria after he was cleared in 2009 of a murder he'd been accused of at 13. | Brian Jackson~Chicago Sun-Times
Updated: April 25, 2013 4:16PM
City Hall paid private attorneys $21.9 million last year — about $420,000 a week — to handle disputes ranging from police brutality lawsuits to an alderman’s fight over a hot dog stand’s name.
More than half of those legal bills went toward defending the Chicago Police Department, city records show.
The city’s tab for outside lawyers has risen sharply since 1998, when it came to a then-record $7.2 million. A law firm headed by a one-time colleague of Mayor Richard M. Daley’s corporation counsel Mara Georges — Andrew M. Hale & Associates — had the biggest tab last year, billing Chicago taxpayers more than $3.5 million for defending the city and the police department in 14 cases involving wrongful convictions and police brutality.
Among the other legal bills that Chicago taxpayers had to pick up last year:
◆ $240,723 for Shefsky & Froelich, the law firm City Hall hired to settle a class-action lawsuit filed by people who claimed their rights to free speech were violated on March 20, 2003, when they were arrested or detained by Chicago Police during a protest over the war in Iraq. Shefsky took over the case from Freeborn & Peters, a law firm that previously had charged City Hall $3.5 million to fight the protesters in federal court. The Emanuel administration settled the case last year, shortly after President Barack Obama withdrew American soldiers from Iraq. The city agreed to pay $6.2 million to 585 protesters and $4.8 million to the attorneys for the protesters. The total cost to taxpayers: $14.7 million.
◆ $43,011 for two law firms — Schuyler Roche & Crisham, and K&L Gates — to fight Felony Franks after the Near West Side hot dog stand’s application for a sign permit was blocked by Ald. Robert Fioretti (2nd), who didn’t like the name of the business, which employed ex-cons. The city settled the case for $50,000, while spending $84,491 to represent Fioretti. Mayor Rahm Emanuel and the city’s corporation counsel Steve Patton have pledged to lower the city’s legal bills by increasing the city’s in-house legal staff. When Emanuel took office in 2011, he found that the Daley administration had budgeted $29.5 million for outside lawyers that year, according to spokesman Roderick Drew. The Emanuel administration cut that by $3 million.
