The Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department has paid two private law firms $628,000 in legal fees to represent it in employment legal matters since 2013, with more than half of the payments billed for two racial-discrimination cases.
But since using private law firms to handle its personnel and employment claims, the department said it has seen the money paid to claimants and their attorneys fall from nearly $664,000 in the five years before they retained the law firms to just $2,000 in the five years since.
Since retaining the Little Rock law firm of Cross, Gunter, Witherspoon & Galchus, "we're pretty pleased that the majority of claims have been dismissed or we won," said Randy Ort, a department spokesman.
The Cross firm has received most of the payments -- about $505,000 in all, according to the state's transparency website.
In the current fiscal year and the previous fiscal year, the firm has been paid at least $206,384 so far for its work in a lawsuit filed against the department by a former Arkansas Highway Police officer, Darren Smith. The Arkansas Highway Police is a department division.
The Cross law firm has received additional payments totaling $138,503.62 in the past two years to represent the agency in other employment cases and provide general legal advice, according to a breakdown the department provided for fiscal year 2014 and fiscal year 2015, which began July 1.
Another Little Rock law firm, Friday, Eldredge & Clark, has been paid $123,236 since 2013, defending the department in a lawsuit filed by Robert Wilson, the agency's former chief legal counsel.
However, the department maintains that even if it hadn't adopted the practice of retaining outside law firms for some legal work, it would have done so in Wilson's case.
"We're not going to ask his former employees to defend us against him," Ort said.
The employment legal work used to be performed by the department's in-house legal division, which now employs nine attorneys and is filling one vacancy. It is headed by Wilson's replacement, Rita Looney.
The division focuses on work related to acquiring rights of way for road construction projects, including title work, as well as claims related to road construction, contractors and damage to department property, Ort said.
The turn to outside counsel came after some members of the Arkansas Highway Commission, including its chairman at the time, R. Madison Murphy of El Dorado, told senior department staff that they thought the department was settling too many cases.
"Questions were raised by the Highway Commission," Ort said. "Did we have the expertise on board? Why are we settling so many cases? That was certainly a turning point."
Department staff met with the attorney general's office before seeking outside counsel, Ort said. It also came after the separation of one staff attorney who wasn't replaced in December 2011 because of the reduced workload, Ort said. His annual salary of $82,000 cost the agency about $128,000 a year when benefits, such as health insurance and retirement contributions, were included.
His salary and benefits over 41/2 years -- $586,681 -- cost about the same as what the department has paid the law firm -- $586,645 -- in the 41/2 years the position has been vacant.
"We didn't know what those numbers were going to show," Ort said, calling them "pretty compelling," especially when juxtaposed against the fall in claims in that time.
The Smith lawsuit is scheduled for a jury trial before U.S. District Judge J. Leon Holmes to begin the week of April 20.
Smith, who is black, filed the lawsuit in May 2013, accusing the highway police and its chief, Ron Burks, who is white, of racial bias in employment practices, including Smith's firing in July 2012. According to the lawsuit, white officers are given the majority of promotions, and black officers are punished more severely than white officers for the same policy violations.
Smith's lawsuit states Burks fired him for lying during a grievance hearing involving Smith, who was seeking reimbursement to pay relatives who helped him move when he was reassigned. Smith denied that he lied. The department has denied Smith's allegations.
The lawsuit is seeking for Smith to be re-instated to his job, an injunction prohibiting the department from further acts of retaliation or discrimination, unspecified compensatory and punitive damages, and attorney's fees.
In a ruling last year, Holmes barred Smith from seeking federal oversight of the department's hiring, promotion and employment practices but otherwise cleared the way for trial.
Wilson's lawsuit is scheduled for a nonjury trial before U.S. District Judge Kristine G. Baker to begin the week of Feb. 17. Baker has yet to rule on a department motion to dismiss the lawsuit.
The Arkansas Highway Commission, which oversees the department, fired Wilson in December 2011 after he filed the lawsuit, which alleges that the commission and department's actions that resulted in his suspension in September were because he was black and had spoken out against discriminatory practices.
Wilson, the top lawyer for the department for 23 years, was placed on administrative leave Sept. 9, 2011, the same day he defended himself before the Legislative Joint Auditing Committee over allegations that he had allowed his staff members to take "inappropriate [paid] absences from work."
A Legislative Audit Division report released in July 2011 found that the department's legal division employees were paid for 2,520 hours of work that they didn't perform over a 21/2-year period. The dollar value of the lost work hours was originally estimated at $74,000 but was later revised to $20,000.
Wilson told the committee that he began allowing his employees to take a half day off with pay every third Friday, on a rotating basis, in 1990, only at the suggestion of his superiors. It was a practice employed elsewhere in the agency, according to the lawsuit.
Little Rock attorneys John Walker and Austin Porter Jr., who filed the lawsuit on Wilson's behalf, have described the appearance before legislators as "a political lynching." Before Wilson's dismissal, his status was changed to leave "without pay, meaning that he already had been fired for all practical purposes," according to the lawsuit.
Metro on 01/12/2015