By Michael A. Smith The Galveston County Daily News
Published: 03-05-08
Galveston school trustees should find a new law firm. At issue is the revelation that Superintendent Lynne Cleveland used the district’s firm Feldman and Rogers in October to file a divorce petition.
Cleveland should not have asked the district’s attorney Erik Nichols for a favor. Taken by itself a reasonable person could call the favor an example of really poor judgment and move on.
But the context the explanation offered by Cleveland and the rationalization offered by Nichols compound the error to the extent that somebody needs to go.
Cleveland said she turned to Nichols because they are good friends. She paid Feldman and Rogers from her own pocket to file the divorce petition.
One of Cleveland’s jobs is to assess whether the school board and by very short extension the taxpayers are getting the best legal services for their dollars. Nichols should have referred Cleveland to one of the hundreds of Texas attorneys not employed by the district.
The cost of those services which is considerably more than average already has become an issue.
Administrators recently attempted to almost double the district’s legal budget from $150000 to $267500. School board president Andy Mytelka objected.
“I think we need to exercise a little more control” Mytelka said. “I would like to approve the bills before the check is cut.”
Maybe the costs were and the increase would have been justified. But who can credibly make that argument? Cleveland speaking objectively about her good friend?
And that’s not the whole story. There’s also the stunningly bad legal advice the firm has given the board pretty consistently for a long time.
Its attorneys have told the board it could talk about things in closed session that can’t legally be talked about in closed session.
By telling the board what the board wanted to hear they gave it a flimsy legal shield but at the cost of its credibility in the community.
The firm told the board it should sue a woman for libel for things she posted on a blog. That advice was ill advised at best and probably self-serving as well. Nobody stood to gain from such litigation except Feldman and Rogers.
The kicker however was Nichols’ take on the divorce filing.
“We do these things for clients” he said. “We do things for people all the time through the different school communities. We’ve gotten board members out of dog-bite cases and represented people’s children who get in trouble and need assistance.
“You do favors in business from time to time. It’s only a conflict of interest if you’re giving a benefit to someone to induce them to give you something.”
Nichols is describing the good-old-boy system. Never mind that the legal advice often is bad and always is more expensive; I do you favors from time to time.
Nichols doesn’t even understand who his client is. It’s not Cleveland who got the favor nor is it the school board. It’s the legal entity called Galveston Independent School District. Nor does he understand that doing favors from time to time for your client’s employees is by definition “giving a benefit to someone to induce them to give you something.” That something being the district’s lucrative legal business.
For the record David Feldman repudiated Nichols’ comment saying the firm does not do favors for clients. The public record says otherwise however.
The taxpayers deserve better than this firm appears equipped to provide.
