Los Angeles County was hit with a record number of lawsuits last year, with spending on outside attorneys ballooning to defend against a deluge of child sex abuse claims.
The number of new lawsuits against the county rose to 2,675 in the last fiscal year — about 400 more than the prior year, according to a tally of the county’s legal spending released this week. It’s the highest figure since the county began publicly tracking the data in 2008.
The county’s Department of Children and Family Services was the most frequently sued, with 882 cases, followed by the Probation and Sheriff’s departments with 304 each. Both the Probation and Children and Family Services departments have been hit with thousands of lawsuits in recent years alleging that children were sexually abused in foster homes and at probation facilities and a former children’s shelter.
Even as the number of lawsuits rose, overall litigation costs plummeted last fiscal year to $220 million, according to the annual report, which tracked county legal spending from July 1, 2023, to June 30, 2024.
That figure marked a 35% decrease from the year before, when the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department agreed to two multimillion-dollar settlements stemming from the 2020 helicopter crash that killed basketball star Kobe Bryant and eight others.
But the amount the county paid to outside attorneys rose 18% from the previous year to $75 million. That was nearly double what the county spent on lawyers four years ago.
With several high-dollar lawsuits out of the way, the Sheriff’s Department’s litigation expenses shrank from around $150 million two years ago to just under $100 million last year — still a large enough figure to make it once again the costliest county agency in the legal spending report.
“We take these matters seriously and are continuously striving to minimize the risk of lawsuits through proactive and preventive measures,” the Sheriff’s Department said in a statement Tuesday.
Melissa Camacho, a senior staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California — which is representing jail inmates in two class-action lawsuits against the county — questioned why the Sheriff’s Department’s budget has risen to $4 billion in light of the enormous legal expenses and repeated lawsuits.
The department “has no incentive to fire deputies who assault our community members, deprive those in jail of basic human necessities, or cause horrific car accidents when the county hands over $100 million in litigation expenses without demanding a single penny from the LASD budget,” she told The Times. “The Board of Supervisors needs to hold LASD responsible for changing behavior and not just keep writing checks.”
The District Attorney’s Office was the second-costliest county agency, topping $24 million last year after a sixfold increase driven largely by lawsuits alleging wrongful prosecutions.
Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman took office in December, after those cases had been settled. His office declined to comment.
Many of the cases described in the county legal spending report involved incidents that occurred long ago. For example, the report includes the county’s $3-million settlement with Samuel Bonner, who was wrongfully convicted of a 1982 murder in Long Beach.
Of the $220 million the county spent on litigation, over $124 million went to paying settlements and court judgments.
The Office of the County Counsel said in a statement that the rise in outside legal spending was due in part to higher attorneys’ fees as well as the roughly $5 million spent in the last fiscal year defending against a flood of sexual abuse cases.
Since state legislators granted victims of childhood sex abuse a new window to sue in 2020, the county has been hit with over 2,600 lawsuits involving more than 6,600 plaintiffs.
County officials previously said they had contracted with 11 law firms to work through the claims, many of which they said they can’t investigate because they no longer have the relevant records.
A more detailed breakdown of spending by outside attorneys was not available, the Office of County Counsel said in a statement.
“The public has a right to know how public money is being spent — whether it’s outside lawyers, consultants, you name it,” said David Loy, legal director with the First Amendment Coalition.
The largest county payout last year was a $24-million settlement with John Klene and Eduardo Dumbrique, who were wrongfully convicted of murder as teenagers and spent more than two decades behind bars based on what their lawyers later described as “lies” and “made up evidence.”
Another hefty settlement stemmed from a lawsuit filed in 2010 over strip searches in the women’s jail, where deputies routinely forced female inmates to expose their genitals during mass searches.
In 2019, a court approved a $53-million payout on behalf of 87,937 women who were searched a total of more than 420,000 times over a nine-year period starting in 2008. The payout of more than $17 million included in the county’s report for the last fiscal year was the third of three installments.
The Sheriff’s Department stopped routinely strip-searching female inmates six years after the case was filed, when it began relying on body scanners.