Thomas MacMillan File Photo
With an 18 percent-plus spike in suits against New Haven, City Hall’s top lawyer is recruiting more hands to help deal with a ballooning workload.
“Our work load is going to outstrip our resources in the future,” Mayor John DeStefano cautioned his corporation counsel, Victor Bolden (pictured above), in a recent memo.
The note was part of a recent round of performance evaluations of top city staff. Bolden’s evaluation, as well as those he wrote for his own staff, reveal an office scrambling to find more pro bono partners to help the city bail out of a rising number of lawsuits.
There were nearly 400 new cases filed against the city in 2010, an increase of over 70 cases from the prior year, according to Bolden. He didn’t give exact figures.
Bolden’s office is still grappling with one high-profile suit from the so-called New Haven 20 firefighters, who won a discrimination complaint against the city in the U.S. Supreme Court. That suit is now back in New Haven federal court, where a judge will decide damages.
His office is also locked in a bitter fight with developer Paul Denz, who owns several buildings in the Ninth Square. Denz sued the city when it knocked down his building following a devastating fire.
DeStefano directed Bolden to settle the Denz suit in 2011, as well as to focus on “housing code and blight enforcement, freedom of Information and ethics training for boards and commissions, and the use of outside counsel.”
In Bolden’s evaluation, DeStefano commended him for “consistently solid” work. He said Bolden needs “a stronger means of balancing all the demands upon your time and your offices [sic] work load.”
DeStefano urged Bolden to rally his troops to prepare for the influx of work. As the workload increases, “attention to how we are organized, motivated and able to do work is going to be greater than ever before,” DeStefano said.
“Given the breadth of work, are staff fully motivated to perform their responsibilities as they might?”
In turn, Bolden passed along guidance to his staff on how to handle the mounting workload.
The guidance came in the performance evaluations for the nine lawyers on Bolden’s staff. The evaluations were performed in the first three months of this year.
Bolden outlined for Vikki Cooper, deputy corporation counsel, how the office might deal with the city’s growing litigation docket.
Last year, the office started sending out a few cases to Wiggin and Dana LLC. The firm agreed to represent the city in a few personal injury cases, Bolden said.
The city needs to “look for more ways to get help with litigation,” Bolden wrote to Cooper. He asked her to develop a model for bringing in Quinnipiac University law students to help the city with legal motions and trial support.
Bolden’s office “has had a long-standing relationship with the Quinnipiac Law School’s clinical externship program,” he explained in an email. “We are looking to build on that relationship and provide more enhanced subject area-specific clinical externship opportunities for Quinnipiac students.”
Bolden solicited attorney Kathleen Foster’s help in expanding the pool of legal interns who currently do work for the city.
Foster, an assistant corporation counsel, has “too many matters within her areas of expertise and far too little time to do it all,” he wrote.
Bolden said his office is also looking to expand its relationships with the Yale Law School. Students from the school have been working with the city for over a year, he said.
As the year continues, “I will continue considering ways to expand the office’s capacity to respond to the increasing volume and complexity of litigation in a time of diminishing resources,” Bolden said in the email.
He said he will make those decisions with consultation from his legal staff. Bolden, who joined the office in January 2009, wrote in the evaluations that he counts on several longtime staffers for advice in the office. Michael Wolak, an senior assistant corporation counsel who has been with the office for 13 years, has done “exemplary” work on police misconduct cases, Bolden wrote. Fourteen-year-veteran Felipe Pastore’s legal positions on zoning matters are “continually upheld by the courts.”
Two more recent recruits are working out well, he wrote. He commended Roderick Williams, who’s been with the city for three years, for his “wide-ranging intellect and winning personality.”
The most recent hire, Meghan Kantors, joined the office in February 2010 as an assistant corporation counsel with a $70,000 salary. She has proved “indispensable,” Bolden wrote.
He directed Kantor to “develop a template for training law student interns and others to help with the city’s real estate transactions.”
As the staff bears down for a tough budget season, and management skips another year of raises, Bolden said he hopes the city can succeed in retaining her.
“In a time of fiscal austerity, the City must take steps to provide opportunities for the continued development and growth of employees, like Meghan, or risk losing them.”