Reply to Whatever happened with APS cotton game?

Forum Index » VA Public Schools other than FCPS

Reply to "Whatever happened with APS cotton game? "

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Quick question, though. Isn’t the idea behind an outrageous demand letter to encourage settlement without the necessity of filing suit? Or is it almost always necessary to have an actual court case pending to get the parties to enter a settlement? And as for what APS discloses with respect to settling legal disputes, I’m not familiar with the way legal expenses are itemized in the budget. Is it just a dollar figure that doesn’t distinguish between legal fees and payouts? Or is there a way to look at the numbers and determine whether anyone other than lawyers have been paid?[/quote]

I can only speak to your first question.   Governments are notoriously slow movers.  They cannot, by design, act quickly.  So the idea that they would get a demand letter and then just react with a settlement is in my view unrealistic. 
In order to pay out taxpayer money a government typically goes through and assesses the value of a case.  Somebody had to do a whole memo justifying paying money out, which belongs to us taxpayers.  It’s not like a corporation which can move nimbly and the internal justification can be relatively weak.  Its usually doing an analysis of the value of each legal claim—so for example looking at Count 1, the applicable statue, the alleged facts supporting it, and successful outcomes for plaintiffs making the same or similar allegation.  Then discounting for the risk of litigation.  Here, there was no complaint to assess those things.  What statute did Arlington violate, what facts support that, and then who else won similar cases.  It’s a lot of work.  It’s not just: hey I’m mad about this and going to file a lawsuit.  In theory, Fairfax could’ve given Arlington one of these before filing.  But even accounting for the fact that Justin Fairfax isn’t  exactly a workhorse, governments usually wait (as I said they don’t move quickly) until there is actually something that they HAVE TO respond to in the form of legal process.  Any settlement here presupposes that Arlington got ahead of a filing but thats not what happens in the real world when dealing with governments.  Finally, the facts on their face are so incredibly unsupportive of any semblance of a real discrimination claim that I don’t buy any monies were paid.

As to your latter question I would be shocked if Arlington could list settlement payouts as “legal fees.”   I don’t know but in the world I live in those monies are paid to lawyers for legal work (and the corpus of settlement $ is not that).  [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics