Law Firms The Big Winners in Chicago Corruption Scandals

The Chicago Sun-Times reports:

As City Hall's scandals mount, so do the legal bills for taxpayers.

Since January 2004, Mayor Daley's administration has spent more than $625,000 on outside lawyers to represent city employees in federal criminal investigations, records show.


That's when the Chicago Sun-Times exposed widespread waste and corruption in the city's Hired Truck Program, sparking a federal investigation that expanded into a rigged hiring system that testimony -- and guilty verdicts -- showed had rewarded patronage workers with government jobs and raises.

"The city pays for legal representation for individuals who are confirmed witnesses [rather than targets or subjects] in a criminal investigation because of their job duties or position as city employees," says Jennifer Hoyle, a spokesman for the city Law Department. "Therefore, the costs . . . refer to providing legal representation for the city or city employees who are witnesses in an ongoing federal investigation[s].''

City Hall has hired nine law firms to work on those federal investigations. Most of the legal fees have gone to Mayer Brown, a law firm that has employed three Daley family members over the years. The city has paid Mayer Brown more than $225,000. Another law firm, Michael W. Coffield & Associates, has been paid more than $170,000.

These legal bills -- part of the cost of corruption -- are just a fraction of the $49.5 million in legal fees the city has paid to private law firms since 2004. Most of those fees were related to police corruption cases, including lawsuits filed by four men who said they were tortured by officers working under former police Cmdr. Jon Burge. The city settled those cases earlier this year, agreeing to pay the men a total of $19.8 million. The city paid $7.1 million to private lawyers to fight those cases, records show.

The Daley family knows how to make a buck off the taxpayers.