Tensions between the California Attorney General’s Office and the office’s rank-and-file attorneys surfaced last month with the filing of a lawsuit challenging the office’s 2023 decision to hire outside counsel to sue oil and gas companies for allegedly misleading the public over the role of their products in allegedly causing climate change.
The union for the civil service attorneys, California Attorneys, Administrative Law Judges and Hearing Officers in State Employment (CASE), filed a lawsuit in Sacramento County Superior Court on Feb. 21. The legal complaint challenges the approval of a contract between Rob Bonta’s office and an outside law firm, Lieff, Cabraser, Heimann & Bernstein LLP, to litigate a case against five major oil companies for their roles in alleged climate-change harms.
CASE had requested the California State Personnel Board to review the Attorney General’s Office’s decision in September of 2023 to hire an outside law firm to assist the office in the litigation against oil giants. The office sought “to hold defendants accountable for the substantial climate-related harms sustained by California, and seeks remedies including abatement, injunctive relief, damages and penalties,” CASE’s complaint states.
The Personnel Board ultimately sided with the Attorney General’s Office, concluding that Bonta had the discretion to hire outside counsel to prosecute the case against oil companies.
“It is unfortunate that the Attorney General’s Office, as the designated lead attorneys for the state, and the office that often leads or participates in extraordinary suits with far-reaching implications for the residents of the state, does not have a designated litigation team or staff to handle lawsuits of this magnitude,” the board said in a decision last year. “The Executive Officer (of the State Personnel Board), however, will not second-guess the DOJ’s assessment of its current staff and limitations as it pertains to its needs in this unique lawsuit.”
In its lawsuit, CASE argues that the contracts in question are illegal since such contracts to hire outside counsel are barred unless they fall into specific exemptions outlined in the state Government Code.
“The board decision not only allows outsourcing in the subject lawsuit, but it also sets a dangerous precedent that would allow the outsourcing of any legal work whenever (the Attorney General’s Office) determines that it does not want to assign a sufficient number of its nearly 1,100 rank-and-file attorneys to perform the work, or hire additional attorneys when it elects to undertake significant litigation,” the complaint states.
CASE members have been irreparably harmed by the outsourcing decision, according to the complaint, and the office should have assigned the work to staff attorneys.
CASE President Tim O’Connor told the Southern California Record that CASE is also concerned that the Attorney General’s Office will use an additional allocation of $25 million approved this year by the governor for anticipated litigation over Trump administration policies.
“The (Department of Justice) may go out to other state agency departments and ‘borrow’ expertise – why do they not try that before going to outside counsel?” O’Connor said. “What is their position on exhausting in-house state service talent before taking such an extreme and expensive measure of wasting $25 million in taxpayer dollars?”
CASE has also expressed concern that the hiring of outside counsel for the anti-oil lawsuit could cost the state between $1,000 and $1,600 per hour.
The CASE lawsuit seeks an order compelling the Personnel Board to reverse its previous decision and rescind the contract with Lieff, Cabraser, Heimann & Bernstein, as well as an award of attorney fees and court costs.