Explain use of private law firms
Republican majorities in both legislative houses and Gov. Tom Wolf have not agreed on much during the Democratic governor’s eight years in office. But they are of one mind in refusing to tell the public why they spend large sums of the public’s money on private law firms.
Commonwealth Court was scheduled to hear arguments Monday in a suit brought by the news organizations Spotlight PA and the Caucus, over the House and Senate majorities’ refusal to disclose their reasons for spending more than $3.5 million of public money on private lawyers.
The chambers responded to right-to-know requests by providing the names of the law firms and their total bills, but blacking out the rest of their entire contracts.
It’s possible that at least some of the money was paid to lawyers to fight right-to-know requests on other matters.
Now the same news organizations have reported that the Wolf administration also has declined to say why it has spent $367,500 on six private law firms over the past three years. And that doesn’t include an array of administrative agencies, which typically spend up to $40 million a year on private counsel.
According to the governor’s Office of General Counsel, revealing the matters for which private counsel was hired could reveal and jeopardize legal strategy, thus making the contracts exempt from the Open Records Law.
That is a stretch, at best. To begin with, the news organizations have not sought to ascertain any legal strategy on any matter. And simply revealing the subject for which a private law firm has been retained betrays nothing about how it has counseled the executive branch or approaches the work.
The news organizations sought a ruling from the state Office of Open Records, which recommended mediation with the general counsel’s office. That produced only descriptions of the work such as “complex litigation services” and “litigation and other potentially emergent legal services on an ad hoc basis.”
Ideally, the courts will force self-serving legislators to tell the public why they spend millions of public dollars on private law firms. The Wolf administration shouldn’t let it go that far before providing the relevant information.