Our schools are short of money and they are doing all they can to make ends meet. Or are they? One area that is simply ignored by the Washoe County School District Board of Trustees is outside legal fees.

In 1997, KPMG Peat Marwick conducted an audit at great expense to the district. One of its recommendations was to hire in-house counsel to cut down and control the outside legal costs. In 1998, they did that when they hired me as their first general counsel.

For the first couple of years, the outside counsel fees dropped but then they started to increase. The district’s outside legal fees at that time were running over $500,000 a year (at times over $750,000) and being paid to the firm of Maupin Cox and LeGoy. I was a member of the Council of School Attorneys, a national organization of in-house counsel for school districts, and gathered information that clearly showed that a district the size of Washoe County needed two in-house attorneys. Other similarly sized districts were able to handle all their litigation and other matters in–house with two full-time attorneys. If there were two in-house attorneys, then outside legal fees would be reduced to a minimal level.

Clark County School District only uses in-house attorneys. They have a general counsel and he has 11 associate counsels. At the time of my employ, I proposed to the superintendent and the board the same model for the WCSD with a general counsel and an associate counsel.

With another in-house attorney I could handle all the litigation and I started trying to get one in the budget. Shortly thereafter, I learned that the superintendent and outside counsel were talking about hiring one of the outside counsel’s partners as a co-general counsel. I argued that we didn’t need the expense of two general counsels, only a general and an associate, but it fell on deaf ears. I told the board what was going on and, as it happened, I also told them that I had just learned that the superintendent was using district funds to pay his United Way contributions.

The superintendent was upset, to say the least, and worked with outside counsel to remove me and get the board to terminate my contract. The board did so in 2004 and outside counsel made another windfall in legal fees in excess of $500,000 (on top of the $500,000 they already made) by taking over all of the in-house cases. Three months later, the superintendent resigned.

Now the board has two full time in-house attorneys. But they still use the same outside firm of Maupin Cox and LeGoy. Outside counsel fees still range between $500,000 and $750,000 dollars. But the cost of the two in-house counsels is approximately $350,000 in salaries, benefits and support staff. So the WCSD is spending almost $1 million a year on legal fees. This is outrageous and not necessary.

The two in-house counsels can handle all of the litigation as well as other legal work. The only need for outside counsel would be in specialty areas such as bond counsel or water rights. But it appears that the board and in-house counsel like being able to just pass things off to other lawyers, regardless of the cost. They need to stop wasting money on outside legal fees.

If it was the board’s own money and not the publics, I doubt they would be so cavalier in their legal expenditures. There is money to be saved if the board has the willpower to do it.

Jeff Blanck is an attorney in private practice in Reno. He can be reached at jblanck@jeffreyblancklaw.com.