The city of Chicago will assemble a legal team dedicated to suing corporations and other organizations that it believes violate the law, a move that officials say will protect residents and fill the breach created by a Trump administration that does not share the city’s priorities.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s Law Department will have an “affirmative litigation” unit as part of next year’s budget, Edward Siskel, the city’s corporation counsel, told the Tribune. The unit will have four attorneys permanently assigned to it, two of which are newly created positions approved by the City Council this month.
The unit will use other city lawyers and outside counsel as needed, Siskel said. The two new positions will pay $65,000 to $115,000 annually, depending on the applicants’ experience.
Though the team has not yet officially been formed, the city already demonstrated its new legal strategy in recent weeks. It is suing both Uber and Equifax for their slow response to data breaches, alleging that potentially hundreds of thousands of Chicago residents have been harmed by the exposure.
And earlier this month, Emanuel announced his intention to sue U.S. Steel after one of the company’s northwest Indiana plants spilled toxic metal into a waterway less than 20 miles from one of the city’s Lake Michigan water intakes. In publicly threatening to sue the company, city officials portrayed it as a crackdown on polluters as President Donald Trump moves to dramatically cut funding for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and state enforcement efforts.
The new unit should bring a return on the city’s financial investment, Siskel said, and the department will be creative as it takes up the new role.
“If the federal government is not going to play their role in enforcement, we’re going to step into that void and do what we need to do to protect the residents of Chicago, to protect the economic lifeblood of the city of Chicago against any threat to it,” Siskel said.
A White House spokeswoman referred questions about the city’s affirmative litigation policy to the Department of Justice, which did not comment.
In a wide-ranging interview with the Tribune this week, Siskel, a former federal prosecutor and deputy White House counsel with the Obama administration, said he began thinking about an affirmative litigation approach months before he became corporation counsel. Based on Trump’s statements before and after the 2016 election, Siskel believed it was clear that the city of Chicago would need to initiate court battles it hadn’t waged in the past.
That belief became policy in August, when the city filed a lawsuit against the federal government after U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions vowed to withhold federal grant money from sanctuary cities that don’t cooperate with Trump’s immigration efforts. It was a fight that had been brewing for months, as the president repeatedly drew incorrect correlations between immigrant populations and crime problems in Chicago and elsewhere.
“We have tools we are not going to hesitate to use if there are bad actors that are harming Chicagoans,” he said.
Siskel was appointed to his new post in February in the weeks after Trump was inaugurated, but the new White House occupant was not the only item on Siskel’s list of challenges when he arrived. He took the reins as Emanuel was shaking off the political effects of the fatal police shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, and while the mayor still needed to emphasize a broad reform effort while gearing up to run for a third term.
In addition to a Police Department that faced heavy scrutiny, Siskel inherited a Law Department that had been under fire for its handling of police misconduct cases. A 2016 Tribune investigation that analyzed nearly 450 civil cases alleging police misconduct since Emanuel took office found that a federal judge had to order the city to turn over potential evidence in nearly 1 in 5 cases.
The city also has been sanctioned eight times for withholding potential evidence in such cases since Emanuel took office. Records show the fines associated with those lapses have cost the city more than $1.3 million.
Emanuel tapped former U.S. Attorney Dan Webb to lead a Law Department review in 2016, an effort that led to more than 50 recommended reforms that Siskel’s predecessor, Stephen Patton, began implementing in the corporation counsel’s office before his voluntary departure.
Webb found no pattern of intentional misconduct in the Law Department, but he stressed the need for a new “culture of compliance” among city attorneys who many plaintiff lawyers had accused of dragging their feet when it came to turning over discovery material in civil cases where the city was on the hook financially for the actions of its cops.
Police reform and changes in the Law Department remain the top priority as 2017 draws to a close, Siskel said, adding that the message about cultural changes that needed to take place has been clear.
“Our lawyers are taking the mindset that when I represent the city, that means that I am accountable for discovery no matter where the materials are held,” Siskel said.
Law Department leaders have long pointed to issues with city record-keeping as being partly to blame for failures to produce potential evidence in civil cases. The Chicago Police Department often has investigative material scattered at several sites, they have said, with no central point where all case information can be gathered easily.
Siskel, as Patton before him, said changes had to be made on the ground when it came to pulling together information to be turned over in court. Siskel said a Law Department paralegal now works on-site at the city Office of Emergency Management and Communications to coordinate discovery work, lead lawyers on individual cases are being held responsible for making sure evidence is gathered, and supervisors are stressing training and full compliance.
The Law Department also has implemented new policies and procedures to better track the material once it is found, and to document the agency’s efforts in the event there are complaints about missing material.
Those who have complained about the department in recent years include judges in U.S. District Court in Chicago. In January 2016, federal Judge Edmond Chang sanctioned the city for withholding information in a police shooting case and detailed significant flaws in how the Law Department responds to civil rights cases. In a bruising ruling, the judge described a byzantine system in which city attorneys don’t understand how police records are kept — and make little effort to find out.
Siskel said his first weeks on the job included visits to several federal judges to try to rebuild a few bridges and better understand their concerns about the city’s actions. He knows many of them from his time in the U.S. attorney’s office, including Chang, who also is a former federal prosecutor.
“They were extremely helpful in sharing their perspective,” Siskel said.
