A review of Duane Morris’ invoices to Central Bucks raised red flags, including ‘excessive’ billing hours

Central Bucks officials were advised last year that the Duane Morris law firm had submitted “seriously inflated” bills in its work investigating allegations of discrimination against LGBTQ students, according to an email published Monday by the Bucks County Courier Times.

The email, from a lawyer with the Wisler Pearlstine law firm, was sent to then-Superintendent Abram Lucabaugh and then-school board president Dana Hunter in June — and only covered the firm’s initial bills after it was hired in late 2022 to respond to a federal complaint against the district. In November, Duane Morris filed additional bills totaling $1.1 million, bringing its total costs to $1.75 million.

The bills, and Duane Morris’s hiring, have been a source of controversy in the district, which changed hands from Republican to Democratic control after a heated November election focused on the district’s treatment of LGBTQ students and other culture-war issues.

Jennifer Barton, a spokesperson for Duane Morris, said Monday that the firm doesn’t comment on billing matters. Edward Diasio, who reviewed the costs and had advised district officials to try to reduce them, declined to comment Monday, citing attorney-client privilege.

Here are some of the red flags raised by Diasio in his June email — and what we know about what happens next.

When Central Bucks hired Duane Morris in November 2022 to respond to a complaint filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, former U.S. Attorney Bill McSwain said in a letter to district leaders that he would bill $940 an hour, while another former federal prosecutor, Michael Rinaldi, would bill $640 an hour.

“To the extent possible, I will endeavor to have associates and/or legal assistants, at lower rates, handle appropriate tasks,” said McSwain, a Republican who ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2022.

While a “good strategy in theory,” that doesn’t seem to be what happened, Diasio said in his email. Instead, “a whole team” was brought in, and “the district paid for all of their combined time to work the matter together.” Several hundred thousand dollars were spent just on internal communications between lawyers, Diasio said.

“There were way too many attorneys working on this matter,” Diasio said.

Diasio questioned the hours the firm billed for work toward its report, unveiled last April, that concluded there was no evidence Central Bucks had created a hostile environment for LGBTQ students.

For instance, lawyers billed 24 hours of work — more than $10,000 — to produce a memorandum after an interview with the principal of a middle school where students had protested the suspension of a teacher. (Duane Morris accused the teacher, Andrew Burgess, of concealing bullying against a transgender student to “weaponize” the allegations and undermine the school board’s GOP majority; Burgess has since sued the district, accusing it of retaliation.)

“This process — significant preparation time for an interview, attendance at the interview by 3+ attorneys, followed by significant backend work summarizing the interview is repeated for many witnesses,” Diasio said. He noted that on the February and March bill, “there are hundreds of hours billed for preparing the ultimate investigation report. This seems extremely excessive.”

Diasio also noted “vague” entries, like one attorney who billed 29 hours of work at $560 an hour for “reviewing documents.”

And he said the amount of time lawyers spent reviewing and submitting records to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, which has been investigating complaints filed by the ACLU and others against the district, was “absolutely staggering.”

“I actually cannot fathom a scenario where so many documents were produced, or produced in a way that took even a fraction of the amount of time billed,” Diasio said.

In addition to preparing the report that found the district hadn’t committed wrongdoing, Duane Morris lawyers also helped the school board implement a policy barring teacher “advocacy” in classrooms.

The policy, which passed in January 2023 and banned teachers from advocating about “partisan, political or social policy issues,” is “literally a 1.5 page document,” Diasio said. “It can be read and understood in a few minutes.”

Why five attorneys were involved in reviewing, commenting on, and revising the policy was “unclear,” Diasio said, noting “dozens” of time entries in November 2022 related to the policy.

The policy spurred backlash in the district, including more accusations that the board was targeting LGBTQ students; when it was proposed, board leaders said it would prohibit the classroom display of Pride flags.

“I recognize that ‘policy’ work is not something that Duane Morris perhaps specializes in, but no more than a handful of hours are likely warranted here,” Diasio said.

The fact that district leaders had engaged in any review of the bills wasn’t publicly known until December, when board members approved paying Duane Morris $1.1 million for the latest bills.

During that board meeting, the district’s business manager, Tara Houser, said that after receiving bills from Duane Morris in April, she hadn’t received any more until Nov. 13.

“I was told the bills were under negotiation,” Houser said. She mentioned that a “previous audit” had identified “several concerns” with the bills, but said she wasn’t involved in those discussions.

Houser told the new Democratic majority that it should pay the latest bills, given the district’s agreement with Duane Morris. (The district’s insurer covered $250,000 of Duane Morris’s $1.75 million costs.)

School board president Karen Smith, who served on the board previously and was reelected in November, said Monday that she wasn’t aware of any review of the bills until Houser’s comments at the December meeting.

“It’s truly staggering that they would so overcharge a public entity,” Smith said. “They’re basically stealing money from kids.”

She said the district is “actively pursuing all legal options that are available to us” to challenge the bills, but declined to comment further.