A recent Law 360 story by Chris Villani, “Boston Urged To Settle Shooting Case As Legal Bill Climbs”, reports that during an emotional hearing, a federal judge ordered both sides in a lawsuit over the fatal shooting of a Black man by Boston police to try to work out a deal, grilling the city's attorneys on their hourly fees in expensive litigation that has been stalled by numerous discovery violations.  While saying that the city still faces a "substantial" risk of default in the now six-year-old case, U.S. District Judge Mark L. Wolf lamented at the end of a six-hour hearing that Boston is paying more than a dozen attorneys, including recently hired Nixon Peabody LLP, to defend the case.

"I don't know of any municipality that has enough money," Judge Wolf said before counting the attorneys sitting shoulder-to-shoulder at the tables in front of him.  "There are 14 lawyers sitting in the courtroom being paid by the city to litigate the effects of the city's repeated failures to provide discovery and to obey court orders," the judge said.  "Most civil cases settle, and I don't think that inertia or oversight should be a reason that settlement in these circumstances isn't seriously explored."

Judge Wolf has repeatedly threatened to hand the city an automatic loss in a case he said is "more messed up than any case I have had in 39 years."  The plaintiff, Hope Coleman, says her son Terrence Coleman was 31 and suffering from schizophrenia when she called 911 in an effort to get him into treatment in 2016.  The responding officers, Kevin Finn and Garrett Boyle, say Terrence Coleman attacked responding EMTs and the officers themselves with a knife during an altercation that ended with Coleman being shot and killed.

At the outset of the marathon proceeding, the judge asked Nixon Peabody attorney Brian Kelly what the city was paying for his services. Kelly said it was $750 per hour, $500 less than his usual rate.  Turning to George Vien of Donnelly Conroy & Gelhaar LLP, an attorney for former Boston Police Commissioner William Evans, Judge Wolf asked, "Are you a bargain compared to Mr. Kelly?"

"I am a bargain in many ways, Your Honor," Vien said, adding that he was billing at $600 per hour.  Leonard Kesten of Brody Hardoon Perkins & Kesten LLP, representing the officers, objected to the airing of lawyers' hourly fees in the first of several tense back-and-forth moments between him and the judge.

"All my clients have ever wanted is a trial," Kesten said. "And they want a trial now, so they can clear their names. That's what should be happening."  "Excuse me," Judge Wolf said, cutting him off. "Are you going to answer the question of what's your hourly rate?"  "I think that my hourly rate is $300 per hour," Kesten said.

In addition to paying its own attorneys, the city has forked over $500,000 to pay for discovery mishaps that an attorney for Coleman, William Fick of Fick & Marx LLP, said "dwarfs anything I have seen in over 20 years of law practice, or in any case I have ever read."

"I feel a bit like I am surveying a battlefield with rabbit holes," Fick said as he argued that default should enter against the city. "Each one of those rabbit holes has a detailed and really jaw-dropping story about a discovery deficiency."  Fick said over 80,000 pages of documents have been turned over, adding that they "should have been produced years ago."

The city has argued that there is no need for a default, citing the hiring of Nixon Peabody and an outside e-discovery expert, as well as the $500,000 and counting it has paid Coleman's lawyers for their trouble.  "This is in fact a very important case, a very significant case, and a trial would let the public see what really happened," Kelly said.  "Plaintiff wants to win this with procedural maneuvering, because they know if it goes to a jury, they may well lose and get nothing."