first raised concerns about the amount of legal fees<\/a> at a meeting of the Board of Directors of the Department of Transportation earlier this month. He said he had not seen such costs for a legal challenge before.<\/p>\n“Because even at those rates, $6 million, I haven’t seen that before,” Sandoval said at the Jan. 9 meeting. “I mean this just gets us to the mediation, as you say, and then we don’t know what the outcome of the mediation is going to be after that.”<\/p>\n
The rates charged by the legal firm’s attorneys are as high as $340 an hour for the senior partner, but members of the board were told the rates are not excessive and have not changed since the dispute first began.<\/p>\n
“That’s not an unreasonable fee,” Masto said at the meeting. Masto also serves as a member of the Transportation Board.<\/p>\n
Dennis Gallagher, NDOT’s chief legal counsel with the attorney general’s office, told the board at the meeting that the legal fees also cover the experts hired to defend the state. He said the case is extremely complex and that Ames has not backed down from its $40 million claim.<\/p>\n
“The state vigorously disputes this claim; has been defending it in court since 2008; we finally got it to a point where it will go to mediation the end of February and this latest amendment is to bring the fees current through the mediation, Gallagher said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
(Sean Whaley\/Nevada News Bureau) – State Sen. Greg Brower, R-Reno, has asked Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto why an outside legal firm was retained to defend the state against a freeway construction dispute. Legal costs charged to the state will total $6 million by the end of an arbitration hearing set for next month. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nevadanewsandviews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15204"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nevadanewsandviews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nevadanewsandviews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nevadanewsandviews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nevadanewsandviews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15204"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nevadanewsandviews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15204\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15205,"href":"https:\/\/nevadanewsandviews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15204\/revisions\/15205"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nevadanewsandviews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nevadanewsandviews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nevadanewsandviews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}