Del Mar school district pays teacher’s legal costs

Source: Del Mar Times

By Marsha Sutton
Senior Education Writer

The Del Mar Union School District agreed to pay a teacher’s court costs and legal fees when the teacher filed a harassment charge last spring against a parent at her school. The teacher claimed the parent, the mother of several children at the teacher’s school, was threatening the teacher and endangering the students at the school.

The teacher, and the district, lost the case when the judge ruled in favor of the defendant, the parent, after a court appearance that included testimony from the teacher, the parent and the school’s principal, Wendy Wardlow of Del Mar Heights School.

The alleged erratic behavior started when the teacher began dating the mother’s now ex-husband (the mother and father were separated and in the process of divorcing at the time).

After the teacher reported to the school’s principal that the mother had made offensive and threatening statements to her, Wardlow alerted DMUSD superintendent Jim Peabody, who brought the issue to the district’s lawyer Dan Shinoff, of Stutz Artiano Shinoff & Holtz.

Shinoff advised the school district to take the threat seriously and to pay the teacher’s litigation costs. The district became involved, he said, "because of the safety of the kids on campus."

After handling three school shootings in San Diego County, Shinoff said he weighed the risks carefully and recommended that the district support the teacher. "The school district’s interest was to make sure that all students and staff were safe which is its constitutional obligation," he said.

If the district had not taken the reported threats seriously and someone had been hurt, Shinoff said people would view the tragedy as having been foreseeable and would consider that those "in loco parentis had recklessly disregarded the obvious."

"That’s a huge calculated risk," he said.

Shinoff had no regrets about advising the district to take the case. "It’s easy to be a Monday morning quarterback," he said in an email.

The harassment case began on April 25 when the teacher filed a temporary restraining order against the mother, which was granted. The mother was ordered to stay at least 100 yards from the teacher until the formal hearing on May 13.

At the May 13 hearing, after testimony, the restraining order was dissolved and "denied with prejudice," meaning the case cannot be filed again.

"The court initially granted the request for a temporary restraining order and later declined to grant a request for a longer term injunction," Shinoff explained.

The case cost the district about $6,700, said Peabody — $2,875 to Shinoff’s firm to represent the plaintiff (the teacher) in court, and $3,800 to the defendant for her attorney’s fees.

After finding in favor of the defendant, the court ordered the teacher to pay $3,800 to the defendant for reimbursement of legal fees. The DMUSD school board then met in closed session and agreed to pay the $3,800 owed by the teacher to the mother. It was after the case was officially closed in August that the district disclosed that the school board had agreed to cover these costs.

The mother said her defense cost $4,500, and she will try to collect the remaining $700 in small claims court.

He Got Quite An Education

Source: San Diego Reader

By Dorian Hargrove | Published Wednesday, Feb. 3, 2010

Every morning at seven o’clock, Rodger Hartnett starts his day. The 62-year-old law school graduate and county employee breakfasts inside his Tierrasanta home as he watches the news. Afterwards, he opens up his book of word puzzles, and for two or three hours he works on them. The puzzles are a strategy to correct his visual processing impairment, an adult learning disability that he was diagnosed with back in January 2006. In the afternoon, following lunch, it’s time for exercise, a five-mile stroll around the neighborhood. This is a typical day for Hartnett, that is, ever since October 2007, when the San Diego County Office of Education–Joint Powers Authority, the agency that handles legal claims for 69 school districts and charter schools in the county, terminated Hartnett from his position as a claims coordinator for incompetence, dishonesty, and insubordination.

One day a month, Hartnett’s list of daily activities increases. On that day, Hartnett opens an envelope from his employer, pulls out a payroll check for $5237.28 and slides the check into a new envelope addressed to his lawyer, who mails the check back to the San Diego County Office of Education. The checks started rolling in to Hartnett’s mailbox in early December, eight months after Judge Steven Denton granted a writ in Hartnett’s wrongful termination suit and two months after the Office of Education’s appeal was denied.

It’s not that Hartnett doesn’t need the money. He cashed in his 401(k) in 2007. He draws partial Social Security benefits, and he adheres to a tight budget, leaving him just enough money in the bank to last him another year. No, Hartnett needs the money, and he wants to return to work. He sends back the check because he says it condones his employer’s decision to put him on paid administrative leave. He says he hates to think that taxpayers are paying him $43 per hour to watch the news, exercise, and work puzzles.

And there’s another reason he doesn’t cash the check. To cash the check, says Hartnett, would mean he’s agreed to a $21,000 pay cut. Before he was terminated, Hartnett’s salary was $112,000 a year; now it’s $91,000.

Sitting outside a Hillcrest coffee shop, Hartnett, a tall, lanky, gray-haired man wearing corduroy pants and a blue-and-white-pinstriped button down, recalls the sequence of events that brought him to this impasse.

It started in August 2003, when the Office of Education hired Hartnett as a claims coordinator, a job he had performed for corporations for 30 years. Working in public service was something he had wanted to do since the 1980s, when he worked for the County Counsel, a county department that handles the county’s civil lawsuits. He also wanted to vest in the California Public Employees’ Retirement System. Hartnett was in charge of three people. He and his team handled third-party lawsuits, such as employment claims and sexual-molestation cases, that were lodged against the county’s school districts. During his first two years on the job, he received positive annual performance reviews from his superiors.

“I walked on water,” quips Hartnett. “Not to pat myself on the back — never mind, no one else is going to — in one of my performance reviews I was described as being a real asset to the operation.”

The positive reviews ended and the problems began in 2006, a year after his boss, executive director of the San Diego County Office of Education–Joint Powers Authority, Diane Crosier, asked him to reduce legal expenditures to outside law firms by 10 percent. Hartnett looked at the law firms the office used. He discovered that in one recent year, the Office of Education had paid nearly $2.9 million to outside legal firms. One firm — Stutz, Artiano, Shinoff, and Holtz — received more than $1.49 million, ten times more than the next-highest-paid firm. Only three firms — Daniel Shinoff’s firm; plus Winet, Patrick, and Weaver, a law firm located in Vista; and Best, Best, and Krieger — received all of the school districts’ lawsuits.

Much of that money, says Hartnett, was for work that could have been done internally: “Shinoff’s law firm was assigned all the labor-intensive work, which was my work.”

Hartnett had an idea. The idea was to use a rotation method to choose which law firm would receive each case. “My thinking was, with competition comes better pricing,” said Hartnett.

Hartnett suggested his idea to Crosier, but she rejected it, saying that the district preferred Daniel Shinoff’s firm. “She said that’s the way it is, that I should leave it alone.

“That’s when I started asking myself if there was a reason this law firm was getting so much of the work,” says Hartnett. “If a lawsuit was getting sent to a particular law firm because it’s quid pro quo, that’s a criminal offense.”

Hartnett recalled a lunch he and colleagues had had with Daniel Shinoff, a lunch that Shinoff had paid for. During lunch, Shinoff and Crosier had talked about a legal case involving Crosier’s son in San Francisco. Shinoff was representing him. Later, Hartnett discovered that Crosier had worked for Shinoff’s firm in the ’80s, after she passed the bar exam.

A few weeks later, Hartnett again pitched his idea to Crosier and again she rejected it. Frustrated and worried that he would be held accountable for overlooking the conflict-of-interest issues, Hartnett included the recommendation in his report for his annual performance review. In her portion of the review, Crosier wrote that he should forget his idea.

“At the time, I thought if I ignored it and it blows up, I would be the guy that gets thrown under the bus,” said Hartnett, reflecting on his decision to press the issue further instead of dropping it as Crosier wanted. “If I knew the ass kicking I would take from doing this, I would have said fuck it, you can have the money. I’m not putting up with this shit. But at the time I didn’t think any of this would happen.”

He went to William “Woody” Merrill, general counsel for the Office of Education and a partner of the law firm Best, Best, and Krieger, to discuss his findings. Merrill advised Hartnett to discuss his concerns with Crosier’s superior, Lora Duzyk, assistant superintendent of business services.

Shortly before he went to Duzyk, Hartnett discovered additional conflict-of-interest issues. He discovered that Merrill is married to the director of human resources at the Office of Education, Michele Fort-Merrill. According to Hartnett’s attorney, Barry Vrevich, only after Merrill’s wife took control of the human resources department did Best, Best, and Krieger, the second-highest-paid firm on the county education office’s panel, start receiving cases.

“The further I went, the more corruption I discovered,” Hartnett said.

Earlier that year, in January 2006, Hartnett misplaced a set of keys. His girlfriend suggested he try to picture the last time he had had them. Nothing came to mind. Hartnett’s girlfriend, a speech pathologist, asked him to spell a three-syllable word. Then she asked him to spell it backwards. Hartnett couldn’t. He wasn’t surprised; he says he assumed he was “dumb” and had a poor memory. As a college student in St. Louis, he’d been forced to take off a semester due to poor grades. Playing basketball in high school, he couldn’t remember how the coach drew up plays. He had never passed the bar exam, failing the multiple-choice part four times. His girlfriend asked him if he had ever been tested for a learning disability. Hartnett had not. She recommended the Lindamood-Bell Learning Center in Del Mar, and a few weeks later, after a series of tests, specialists confirmed that Hartnett suffered from visual processing impairment. His scores revealed that his reading comprehension was at a sixth-grade level.

Hartnett sent an email to Crosier informing her of his condition. He explained that the visual processing impairment affected his work. He would forget emails; anything visual would not stick, or as he explains it: “It affected my ability to do my job. Your mind acts like a camera. My brain doesn’t have a camera — or there’s no film in the camera. I have to paint by numbers.”

In June 2006, Hartnett asked for financial assistance to help pay for the $5000 corrective training at the Lindamood-Bell Institute. His request was denied. “I was a little pissed off,” said Hartnett, before laughing. “If I would have lost my arm, there would have been some help, some accommodation.”

He was, however, allowed to use his vacation and sick leave for his five-week training program to help him cope with the disability. Every day for five weeks, Hartnett left the office at 2:30 p.m. and drove to Del Mar for a two-hour training session. Most of the exercises consisted of reading a paragraph and then describing what he’d read. During his training, no one at the Office of Education commented on his disability, though shortly after beginning the training, Crosier stripped away Hartnett’s supervisory duties.

By the time the five weeks were up, Hartnett had gone from a 6th-grade reading-comprehension level to a 12th-grade level. A couple of months later, Crosier restored his supervisory duties, but he had only one person to supervise. “She took away my investigator and my secretary. It was a violation of the California Fair Employment and Housing Act. They are not supposed to discriminate against you because of a disability.”

The following summer, in June 2007, Hartnett sent an email using the office’s email account to a Los Angeles lawyer, one he had known for years, asking his opinion on a class-action lawsuit his boss had accused him of mishandling and overpaying for. He attached a copy of the closing report on the case. Hartnett later mailed the lawyer a copy of the original lawsuit at his own expense. The lawyer did not charge any fees for reviewing the matter.

A few weeks later, Crosier called Hartnett into her office. She asked him whether he had used county resources to consult with the lawyer. He had not. She asked him whether he had used the county email system to send the document. He says he forgot that he had sent it using his county email address and he told her no.

“I didn’t remember doing it,” said Hartnett. “That’s the basis for the dishonesty. Knowing all the while that I have a visual processing impairment that affects my ability to remember visual events. They knew that.”

On October 5, 2007, Hartnett was terminated. Seventeen months after that, on March 27, 2009, San Diego superior court judge Steven Denton granted the writ that ordered the San Diego County Office of Education to reinstate Hartnett and award him back pay for the time he was out of work. In October, the office’s appeal was dismissed. On November 30, Hartnett reported to work, the first time in two years, only to be handed a letter that stated he was being placed on paid administrative leave and ordering him not to speak to any school district representatives.

Hartnett says the county must have hired someone else to do his job, meaning taxpayers are paying not only Hartnett’s salary but also the salary of whoever is replacing him. In addition, Hartnett claims the county is not following the court order to send him back pay for the past two years. In early December he received two checks for back pay; the gross amount was $46,000, not the $300,000 he was owed.

According to Jim Esterbrooks, public information officer for the Office of Education, the office will not comment on Hartnett’s case. The office also refused to provide its legal costs associated with Hartnett’s termination suit.

The San Diego County Office of Education “continues to request Shinoff and Winet,” wrote Esterbrooks in an email. “Both are extremely experienced and successful in their work on behalf of school districts. That’s why school districts request them. SDCOE continues to use Best, Best & Krieger, where Merrill works.”

Hartnett estimates that the cost of fighting the wrongful termination suit and of paying him to stay home is approaching the million-dollar mark.

“These are public funds,” Harnett says. “This isn’t corporate greed; this is public money we are talking about.”

On December 15, Hartnett received a letter notifying him that once again the Office of Education recommended that he be terminated. He is appealing.

The Schoolhouse Lawyer Who Helped Hire His Overseer

Source: Voice of San Diego
By EMILY ALPERT

Monday, March 2, 2009 | Lawyers from a firm that has received millions of dollars in business from a public agency that handles lawsuits for school districts have, at least twice in recent years, helped it screen potential employees who later oversaw outside attorneys' work.

The Risk Management Joint Powers Authority, a public agency composed of dozens of local school districts and run through the San Diego County Office of Education, has paid the law firm of Stutz, Artiano, Shinoff & Holtz nearly $7 million between July 2002 and July 2008 to handle lawsuits brought against school districts.

Two shareholders in the firm, Daniel Shinoff and Jeffery Morris, have helped screen job applicants for the agency by sitting on the first of two interview panels that candidates undergo before being hired. Such interviewers don't make the final hiring decisions, but they narrow the hiring pool by asking predetermined questions provided by the human resources department and ranking candidates based on their responses.

Including the attorneys in the interview process means that in at least two instances, an employee has owed his or her job, in part, to one of the firms that he or she is hired to monitor.

The practice is among a bevy of complaints lodged in a lawsuit by a former authority employee, Rodger Hartnett, who alleges that the Stutz Artiano firm received a disproportionate share of work "based on personal relationships" in the office rather than merit. Harnett, who was interviewed for his job by a panel that included Shinoff, claims in his wrongful termination suit against the County Office of Education that he was fired because of his complaints about Stutz Artiano.

Several legal and ethics experts cautioned that the practice of having the contracted attorneys aid in the hiring process was fraught with the risk that employees would feel they owed loyalty to the attorneys.

"The lawyer's incentive is clearly to hire a 'yes' person, a person who won't challenge their costs and will stick with and approve the lawyers they already have," said University of San Diego law professor Shaun Martin.

Shinoff said he personally has only interviewed employees for one position, the claims coordinator job that ultimately went to Hartnett five and a half years ago; Morris likewise said he had interviewed employees for just one position, that of a claims adjuster, and couldn't recall the date. Both claims coordinators and claims adjusters analyze the agency's legal exposure, oversee litigation and create plans with attorneys on how to pursue and resolve cases, according to job descriptions.

Neither of the two employees would choose which attorneys get which cases. But they are one layer of oversight in an agency that handles millions of dollars in legal work annually. They help ensure that attorneys do not run up unreasonable bills.

County Office of Education spokesman Jim Esterbrooks said that including the attorneys in the interviewing process wasn't problematic. In a written statement, he said it is common practice at his agency for vendors to help screen employees because they are familiar with the work. The practice could be continued in the future, he said.

"Such a position has negligible impact," Esterbrooks said. He added that Shinoff "doesn't have any hiring clout or even close."

The amount of money paid to Stutz Artiano from July 2002 to July 2008 dwarfs what was paid to two other firms that handle lawsuits for the agency — $1.56 million and $324,000, respectively — in the same time period. The firm has decades of experience handling school cases, and its attorneys are reputed to be aggressive litigators and have earned praise from school officials across the county. Some school districts request them by name.

Superintendent Describes Practice as Common

Job applicants at the agency typically undergo two panel interviews before they are hired. The first is a screening interview in which a panel of interviewers asks predetermined questions provided by the human resources department, listens to the candidates, and ranks them based on their answers. The panels have ranged in size from two to four interviewers in recent years, according to the human resources department. Some applicants also take tests relevant to their work. Shinoff and Morris said they have only sat on that first panel.

The second and final interview for risk management jobs is performed by a panel that includes Executive Director of Risk Management Diane Crosier, and the ultimate authority on all hiring decisions is county Superintendent of Schools Randolph Ward.

The County Office of Education initially said it could not answer questions about the hiring process because of the Hartnett lawsuit and referred voiceofsandiego.org to the transcript of his disciplinary hearing, which gave limited information about the process. It later supplied some basic information about the hiring process through written statements and a brief comment provided by its spokesman.

Ward and other County Office employees declined to be interviewed on the topic. Simple questions sometimes took a week or more to answer. And the agency required voiceofsandiego.org to file a written request for economic disclosure forms that are supposed to be readily available with no questions asked.

Numerous former agency employees did not return calls or declined to speak on the hiring process and the Stutz Artiano attorneys' involvement. Testimony at the Hartnett disciplinary hearing was sometimes difficult to reconcile with other statements.

"We often ask some of the technical contractors who have expertise in that area to come in and participate on a hiring committee because they have the kind of expertise that we don't as lay people," Ward said, according to the transcript of Hartnett's disciplinary hearing. He added, "It's common that you will bring somebody from the private sector to give you that perspective."

Yet information supplied by the agency dating back to July 2005 shows no other attorneys or vendors sitting on the interview panels, which typically have included business analysts from the county office and managers from school districts. No earlier records were available from the human resources department, said Pam Gilles, senior director of internal business services.

Ward declined to be interviewed to clarify how his remarks could be reconciled with the information supplied by human resources staff, and Esterbrooks said that Crosier had declined to provide examples of other agencies that used the practice.

Risk management experts from across California said such a hiring policy was not standard, but there are few fixed standards for hiring in such agencies. James Marta, accreditation manager for the California Association of Joint Powers Authorities, said he didn't know of any other agencies that use their panel attorneys to help interview applicants, but did not think the practice was inherently problematic.

"You will have the pressure that, if you see something they are doing, you don't want to disclose it because they hired you," Marta said. But the same pressure would exist if the employee saw their boss doing something improper, he said, adding, "It's a natural thing that happens. I don't think that's extraordinary."

Other legal experts and ethicists were wary of the practice. Screening employees for the same department that sends the attorneys business and tracks their costs "certainly raises ethical questions," government ethicist Bob Stern said, even if the specific employees themselves do not assign legal work. Martin, the USD law professor, said it was extremely rare for a law firm to be involved in hiring people who would monitor them. It is not categorically wrong, Martin said, but is "fraught with danger."

Stern said, "The problem is, I'll hire you, you hire me."

University of San Diego public interest law professor Robert Fellmeth found the practice counter-intuitive. He wrote in an e-mail that the agency employees would naturally view their attorney interviewers as people "to whom you owe some loyalty." That runs exactly counter to the actual obligation from the attorneys to their clients and overseers in the agency, Fellmeth wrote. Consulting an attorney during hiring would only make sense if there are legal questions about the hiring process, he wrote.

Former Employee Alleges 'Insider Dealings'

While employed for the agency, Hartnett complained that Stutz Artiano was getting a disproportionate share of work and expressed concern about its billings, according to an internal memo and testimony at his disciplinary hearing.

In his lawsuit and a mediation brief, Hartnett alleges that he was fired for blowing the whistle on "insider dealings" to the firm and specifically to Shinoff. He wrote in his lawsuit that he came to believe that "Mr. Shinoff was receiving business or a disproportionate volume of business based on personal relationships within our department rather than on merit."

The agency counters that Hartnett was fired for negligence, insubordination and dishonesty, including discussing a confidential file with an outside attorney and lying about it. He thus "violated specific SDCOE Risk Management procedures regarding confidentiality of claims files," according to his initial August 2007 termination notice. An internal Office of Education commission found that his termination was "for good cause and not excessive" and that he was not the victim of retaliation.

"These were very serious violations of trust which had the potential, if repeated, of seriously harming the relationship between the [agency] and its member districts and the districts' legal interests," wrote the three-member commission of Mary Beall, Miriam Rothman and Bert Seal in a decision signed by Rothman. It concluded, "Hartnett did not prove that the legitimate reasons (for his termination) were a pretext for retaliation."

Shinoff called Hartnett's allegations "vulgar accusations" that there was no point rebutting, and declined to comment on whether they were true.

"You work hard for people," he said. "Your work speaks for itself."

Hartnett is appealing the finding in Superior Court. "I discovered and reported a culture of corruption within my department involving conflicts of interest and interpersonal relationships," Hartnett wrote in his suit.

He has questioned whether it is appropriate for employees to retain the same legal firms for their personal use that they hire for the agency. Stutz Artiano has represented Rick Rinear, the employee who makes the ultimate decision of which attorneys to assign to handle cases, in at least two cases including a dispute over a plot of land in Jamul that was settled last year. Hartnett alleges that Rinear could have gotten discounts on services because he has the power to steer business toward Stutz Artiano, but could not provide evidence that a discount had been given.

Rinear declined to be interviewed and didn't respond to a request for his private legal bills to check the allegation. Esterbrooks said he was unable to provide any details about the process by which Rinear was hired in 1992.

Hartnett also alleged in his suit and interviews that Shinoff regularly bought lunches for employees, including senior claims investigator John Vincent, senior claims adjuster Lisa Jensen, and Crosier, who worked briefly for Stutz Artiano 14 years ago. She also had worked alongside Shinoff at a previous job, according to her testimony at Hartnett's hearing. Crosier reported no gifts on financial disclosure forms between 2004 and 2007; the agency said employees in Vincent and Jensen's positions aren't required to file such forms under San Diego County Office of Education board policies.

Under state law, gifts that exceed more than $50 annually from a single source typically must be disclosed, said Roman Porter, executive director of the Fair Political Practices Commission.

Few Standards on Assigning Legal Work

Sixty-eight school districts and charter schools largely in San Diego County have joined the Risk Management Joint Powers Authority to insure themselves against claims and lawsuits for liability, property damage and workers' compensation. The authority analyzes claims and hires attorneys in suits against the school districts and charters. Members pay into their own funds with the authority to cover the costs of their claims.

Some of its employees oversee attorneys and work out litigation plans with them; Hartnett said in interviews that he also reviewed cases to make sure that legal bills were reasonable. The authority is administered by the county superintendent of schools and the San Diego County Office of Education, which hires and supervises its employees.

Attorneys at the Joint Powers Authority are selected for each case by Rinear, who defers to school districts if they choose an attorney first, according to the hearing transcript. He chooses from three firms: Stutz; Winet, Patrick & Weaver; and Kleindinst, Fliehman & McKillop. Agency policies say only that cases are assigned to the attorney who is most qualified to handle them with consideration given to the school district or charter school's wishes. It doesn't specify what would make an attorney more or less qualified to handle a case.

During the Hartnett hearing, Crosier said she believes that Shinoff gets more work simply because school districts often ask for him in employment cases, which tend to be more expensive. The same explanation was given by Lora Duzyk, assistant superintendent of business services, in a memo to Hartnett in 2007.

Crosier's claim cannot be verified because Esterbrooks said the agency does not routinely document whether school districts ask for a specific lawyer. Crosier described Shinoff as the most experienced of the three attorneys they hired. Some school districts said they have specifically requested Shinoff; others said they trust the judgment of the agency and would rarely demand an attorney by name.

Government agencies such as the Joint Powers Authority are free to select professionals, including attorneys, without competitive bidding. Some choose to do competitive bidding anyway to reduce costs and foster competition. Harold Pumford, chief executive officer of the Association of Governmental Risk Pools, said there are no firm standards on how to assign cases to attorneys.

"The fact that one firm gets more work than others is not, per se, an improper practice," said Jose Gonzales, deputy general counsel for San Diego Unified, which is not part of the Joint Powers Authority. "It's up to the clients to make that decision."

School district leaders such as Encinitas Superintendent Lean King said Shinoff had a solid reputation for defending school districts on cases in which a lot of money is at stake. Mike Castanos, assistant superintendent of business for National School District, said the district has specifically requested the "highly regarded" firm in the past. And Carlsbad Superintendent John Roach called him simply "good."

"He is aggressive, and if you have a case that fits that, I could see requesting Dan," Roach said.

In his more than 25 years of work with the agency, Shinoff has defended Fallbrook schools for yanking an article and a student editorial on sex education from a school paper; he fended off a negligence claim against Grossmont schools from grieving parents of two teens shot dead by a classmate. And school districts that do not contract with the agency have also used Stutz Artiano, as well as Shinoff. San Diego Unified, for instance, hired the firm to help negotiate a contract for former Superintendent Carl Cohn.

Not everyone is satisfied with the firm. Critics abound at MiraCosta College, where Shinoff was involved in the controversial aftermath of an investigation of the illegal sale of palm trees at the college. Several college trustees complained that Shinoff pressured them to award a roughly $1.6 million settlement package to then-President Victoria Richart after faculty and staffers criticized her handling of a costly investigation of the palm tree scandal.

"I share in [another trustee's] belief that Stutz, Artiano, Shinoff & Holtz failed to properly represent the College," wrote board member Judy Strattan in a legal declaration.

Stutz Artiano was also criticized by Julie Hatoff, the former vice president of the college, who unsuccessfully sought to have the attorneys disqualified from representing MiraCosta in her suit against the school. She claimed that the firm never told her it was representing the college — and not her — in their conversations. Shinoff was also mentioned in a lawsuit against the college by resident Leon Page, who argued that the attorney placed the interests of Richart ahead of those of taxpayers and the board and prodded them to approve an excessive buyout that he believes violated state law.

A judge ruled in September that the payout was not illegal; Page is appealing the ruling.

Please contact Emily Alpert directly at emily.alpert@voiceofsandiego.org with your thoughts, ideas, personal stories or tips.