Philadelphia City Hall building. Photo: Diego M. Radzinschi/ALM Philadelphia City Hall building. Photo: Diego M. Radzinschi/ALM

This article is an excerpt from a full piece on the budget cuts, available on The Legal Intelligencer.

The Philadelphia court system, the District Attorney's Office, the Defender Association and the City Law Department are all slated to take cuts under Mayor Jim Kenney's latest budget proposal, which was recently revised to reflect the grim financial situation the country has found itself in during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The agencies are facing a range of proposed cuts, and leaders were quick to stress that the process is still ongoing. However, the agencies are bracing for belt-tightening, which could mean delayed tech investments, not hiring new attorneys and putting strict caps on the legal spend for outside counsel.

At the start of May, Kenney proposed a budget that cut nearly $650 million from the spending plan he had initially proposed to City Council in early March. The shortfall comes as COVID-19-related business closures have halted real estate and economic activity, and staggering unemployment has struck a blow to the city's expected wage tax earnings. The plan, announced May 1, proposes spending $4.9 billion, which is a 4.4% decrease compared to the initial projections.

 

The Law Department is set to see a significant cut, if the mayor's proposal is enacted. The new budget proposes an 11% decrease for the agency, or a reduction of $1.8 million from the $16.3 million that had been initially proposed. The department had been set for a slight increase in the 2021 budget; however, the new proposal would bring the department's budget to less than what was adopted in 2019.

City Solicitor Marcel Pratt noted that the 11% drop does not give the full picture of the potential impact to his office's budget, since compensation for about 100 of the agency's 225 attorneys are funded through other city agencies. However, he said that, if enacted as proposed, the Law Department could see delays in rolling out new legal tech projects and serious belt-tightening for the outside legal spend.

"As we assign work under our current contracts, we're going to have to implement very strict budgets, and probably be more conservative about what we send out," Pratt said.

On the tech side, he said the office had been looking to hire a full-time e-discovery specialist to help implement the roll-out of new software, but that may be on pause given the new budget proposal.

"A project that's been very important to me since I started has been acquiring an e-discovery platform," Pratt said. "I can't say that's not going to happen, but it's something that's been called into question."

Another project he'd been eager to bring online but that might now be on hold is the implementation of a document management platform, which would increase functionality and allow attorneys to search across the city's entire legal database. The training budget might also see cuts, Pratt said, and the agency's travel budget for CLE programs, which Pratt noted had been greatly expanded recently, could also see reductions.

"You always have grand plans for making the office better, and then this happens," he said, adding he is going to continue to push for ways to keep these projects in the works despite the budget cuts. "It's hard. Everybody's making very tough decisions."

 

The mayor's budget, however, is the first step in the process for allocating funds to city agencies, and it is City Council that will have the ultimate say. According to the council's web page, no schedule has yet been set for budget testimony by the agency heads.