Management of the city of Chicago’s sprawling government always has been a challenge, and the opportunities for patronage, favoritism and simple wasteful spending are vast.
Still, we were alarmed reading the latest installment of the Tribune’s investigation of the city’s massive spending on outside attorneys in addressing the pile of lawsuits tied to police misconduct and wrongful convictions. Both the city’s Law Department and the law firms making substantial sums from these cases need to fix what clearly is a major deficit of city controls and due care and attention on the billable hours being submitted for this work.
The amounts city taxpayers are shelling out for police-related settlements and judgments is staggering, amounting to more than $200 million last year and topping more than $80 million through just the first four months of this year, according to the city.
The cost is so steep that the city last month felt forced to issue taxable bonds to cover $267 million in judgments and settlements at an interest rate around 6%. Those costs were part of a $512 million total bond issuance on which taxpayers will pay a total of $140 million in interest over the next seven years. So we need to tack on tens of millions more in financing charges to that $267 million for police-related legal costs.
The latest Tribune report detailed how dozens of invoices from law firms to the city include instances in which a single attorney worked more than 24 hours in a single day. That naturally raised questions, not about whether the laws of time and space had been upended but about the efficacy, and honesty, of the billing systems being used by the firms, the city or both.
Some of the firms said the hours actually were worked by other people, too, not just the attorney listed, but they were submitted under the name of that single attorney. That’s contrary to the city’s rules for such work, so at the very least we have a paperwork problem.
But there also were instances, once the Tribune brought these issues to the attention of the city and the firms, in which the law firms themselves discovered clerical errors (strangely always in their favor). In one case, 3.6 hours in 2021 had been mistakenly listed as 33.6 hours. The firm said it reimbursed the city. (Did the firm pay interest on those 30 hours it overbilled? If not, it should have.)
The difficulty the city is having ensuring it’s not overpaying the multiple outside firms for these wrongful-conviction and other misconduct-related cases again raises questions about whether the city should be doing more of this work in-house. In its first investigative piece on this topic, published late last month, the Tribune laid out how lawyers had dragged out many of these cases for years, with some plaintiffs telling reporters they would have accepted far less than the settlements they ultimately got if the city had moved more quickly.
As it ended up, taxpayers paid more than they might have to the plaintiffs as well as far more to the outside law firms, who kept on billing away.
We don’t pretend that all these cases should be treated the same. But management of this highly unfortunate obligation of the city, tied to our troubled law-enforcement past, is clearly not where it needs to be.
The Law Department must fix that. Immediately.
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