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Texas attorney general's office paying lead lawyer $540 per hour to defend against whistleblower law
by Emma Platoff, Texas TribuneThe Texas attorney general's office will pay outside counsel $540 an hour to defend the state agency against accusations that it was retaliating against top aides when it fired them just weeks after they reported their boss, Ken Paxton, to authorities for possibly breaking the law.
William Helfand, a Houston attorney with Lewis Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith LLP, will make $540 per hour for his work on the case while an associate attorney and a paralegal will make $350 and $215 per hour, respectively, according to a contract with the agency.
They filed the agency’s first official response Monday to a lawsuit filed by four of eight whistleblowers who left the agency after leveling the accusations. Paxton's attorneys roundly rejected pages and pages of allegations of wrongdoing and retaliation in just a few brief sentences.
The agency “generally denies each and every claim and allegation” made by the whistleblowers, attorneys for the state wrote in the brief filing.
Read more: https://www.texastribune.org/2020/12/14/texas-attorney-general-ken-paxton-whistleblowers/