The Española School Board voted July 2 to award contracts, based on the recommendation of District Superintendent Danny Trujillo, to all three firms who submitted bids for legal services.
Trujillo formed a committee to provide recommendations regarding legal firms the District should use when claims and other legal matters are filed. The three firms under consideration were Cuddy & McCarthy; Sutin, Thayer & Brown and Walsh Anderson.
Only District employees made up the committee members: Española Elementary Principal Julé Skoglund, Special Education Assistant Director Deirdre Montoya and Transportation Director Sennie Quintana all evaluated the different bids based on certain criteria the District laid out.
According to the request for proposal, there were nine categories the District used to evaluate the three firms:
• Could the firm represent the District in personnel matters
• Civil rights issues
• Civil representation issues with the federal, state and local agencies
• Construction contracts, budget and fiscal issues and
• Election matters and insurance
There was also pricing and experience categories that members had to decide on, such as the hourly rate the firms charged and their experience working with the superintendent.
Committee members were directed to evaluate the different firms and assign points based on their judgments of the three companies. The higher the points they assigned, the higher they feel the firms’ qualifications are in a particular category. For the majority of the criteria, the maximum number of allotted points were between five and 15. The only exception was the personnel matters criteria, which was worth 35 points.
The committee members met June 23 to present their evaluations and discuss their findings.
Based on the points system, Walsh Anderson was the clear winner. That firm garnered 300 points, followed by Sutin, Thayer & Brown with 218 points and Cuddy & McCarthy was third with 208 points.
Despite the committee’s recommendation to use Walsh Anderson, Trujillo said all three firms had the legal expertise to assist the District with the variety of cases with which it is involved and Trujillo recommended all three firms be awarded contracts.
The different law firms would be assigned a particular case depending on the experience they had handling such cases. The firms would only be paid based on the amount of time they worked on the District’s cases so the amounts allocated to the firms will vary.
Trujillo said that Walsh Anderson is a law firm that specializes in special education, so he recommended a contract based on that specialization. Sutin, Thayer & Brown will be used on an as-needed basis for cases based on the discretion of the superintendent.
Even with the different awards, Trujillo said he is primarily interested with using Cuddy & McCarthy to handle the majority of the cases in which the District is involved. Trujillo said he is very impressed with its credentials.
“Primarily what I wanted was Cuddy,” Trujillo said. “The Board really was concerned about who the best lawyers are. The Cuddy law firm is tied really well with the National School Board Association. When they (Association) do the annual law conference, Cuddy is the firm that comes in and they do all the workshops, so for sure I want to emphasize the point that I wanted Cuddy as our primary legal firm.”
Two of the legal firms mentioned have done business with the District before. The District paid Cuddy & McCarthy more than $33,000 to handle a case while the Walsh Anderson firm was paid more than $50,000 for the services it rendered.