See the reasons why Pennsylvania’s legislature paid millions to outside law firms in 2019 and 2020

Thousands of documents reveal how the legislature spends your tax dollars on private lawyers.

• Angela Couloumbis/Spotlight PA
  BioRecent Stories

  

  Angela Couloumbis has covered government, politics, courts and crime for The Philadelphia Inquirer since 1996. She has reported on forest fires in the Rocky Mountains, riots in Washington, D.C. and Cincinnati, the mob’s effort to infiltrate city hall in New Jersey’s poorest city and the 2004 Olympics in Athens, Greece.
  
  For the past 13 years, she has focused on government and politics in the Pennsylvania State Capitol, shedding light on backroom dealing and corruption. She was part of a two-member reporting team that, in 2014, exposed a secret effort by the state Attorney General’s office to shut down an investigation into lawmakers who accepted envelopes stuffed with cash from an undercover government informant. The reporting led to a series of resignations and criminal convictions over several years. She has spent the past 18 months focused on investigative reporting on the #metoo movement in Pennsylvania. Her coverage has included projects on secret, taxpayer-funded sexual harassment settlements in the Legislature and state government.
• Sam Janesch/The Caucus
  BioRecent Stories

  

  
  Sam Janesch is a political reporter for LNP. He can be reached at SJanesch@lnpnews.com, or (717) 481-6024. You can also follow @SamJanLNP on Twitter.

 Tim Tai / Philadelphia Inquirer

The legislature provided more than 4,100 pages of records, but information was often heavily redacted.

Spotlight PA is an independent, nonpartisan newsroom powered by The Philadelphia Inquirer in partnership with PennLive/The Patriot-News, TribLIVE/Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, and WITF Public Media. Sign up for our free newsletters.

At the beginning of the year, The Caucus and Spotlight PA filed public records requests with the state House and Senate for invoices, receipts, and other documents related to the private law firms lawmakers hired at taxpayer expense in 2019 and 2020.

In response, the legislature provided more than 4,100 pages of records.

Information was often redacted to the point of not being able to identify the case or who was being represented.

It took months for reporters to organize the records and match some of the invoices with other documents to determine the nature of the matters. The results are in the table below.

Based on a close review of the documents, there are up to two dozen additional matters for which the House paid a private law firm in 2019 and 2020. But because of the lack of specificity, the redactions, and the organization of the pages, it’s impossible to tell for sure. For the same reasons, it is impossible to calculate the total cost to taxpayers for some of the cases.

>> READ MORE: Pennsylvania lawmakers spend millions of taxpayer dollars each year on private lawyers, but rarely disclose who required representation — and why.

The table shows cases that the news organizations were able to identify using invoices and engagement letters, which law firms use to outline the services they plan to provide as well as the costs. Unlike a contract that goes through a bidding process and should be made public on the state treasurer’s website, the legislature signs these letters with no public disclosure or oversight.

Some cases overlap between the chambers, and a single chamber will sometimes use multiple firms for the same case.

Legislative leaders did not respond to requests to provide more information about redacted or vaguely described cases.

To send a tip about any of the cases in the database, contact reporters Angela Couloumbis and Sam Janesch.

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