The Baltimore Law Department yesterday told the Maryland Appellate Court it could cost as much as $3.6 million to hire a legion of private contract lawyers to cull through the subpoenaed documents ordered to be released to the inspector general as part of her lawsuit against the city.

The order by Circuit Court Judge Pamela J. White on Monday “would irreparably harm the City,” Michael Redmond wrote on behalf of City Solicitor Ebony M. Thompson and Mayor Brandon Scott, “by requiring a massive expenditure of funds the City did not put in its budget and cannot possibly get back if spent.”

But as the Appellate Court ruled two weeks ago in denying another “emergency appeal” by the city, there is no need for the law department to painstakingly check for confidential and other privileged information because IG Isabel Mercedes Cumming and her staff are prohibited from disclosing it.

So says Cumming in court filings in the case. Her office, she says, can process the documents at no extra charge as part of their routine office practices.

The Association of Inspectors General’s “Green Book,” followed by IGs nationwide, describes in detail how investigations are to be conducted to safeguard the identity of confidential sources and to protect personal financial, medical and attorney-client information.

In the case of Cumming’s office, all investigations into waste, fraud and abuse in city government are “internal,” or kept from outside disclosure until the findings are issued confidentially to city management, including members of the mayor’s and city administrator’s offices, via advanced copies.

A “report synopsis” is then prepared by the OIG that condenses the findings of the full report without providing names or other identifying markers. Typically included is a response by the agency head responsible for the matter under scrutiny.

“The following synopsis is a condensed version of the full report provided to City management officials and does not contain all investigative information”  – Notice found in all OIG reports.

If persons are identified in news reports in The Brew or elsewhere, that is a result of their own reporting and fact checking.

“Because any restricted document will go solely to the Office of Inspector General and be disseminated no further at this juncture, the potential harm [cited by the law department] is not irreparable,” Appellate Court Judge Kevin F. Arthur wrote, denying an earlier appeal by Solicitor Thompson to stay a Judge White order.

Since January, the city solicitor has cut off the IG’s direct access to city servers and databases, saying the IG had “unfettered” access to records that may be privileged or subject to the Maryland Public Information Act.

At the same time, the law department began redacting, but mostly ignoring, records requests made by the IG to city agencies. The impasse began with the law department blacking out nearly 200 pages of financial and payroll records from the SideStep, a youth diversion program that Cumming later cited for serious confidentiality breaches and for falsifying invoices.

Hiring Outsiders

Mayor Scott responded to Cumming’s findings by hiring the accounting firm of Baker Tilly and former D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine to “review” – not investigate – the SideStep program and make recommendations.

“Racine expects to complete the review within 90 days and present findings to the mayor, City Council and ultimately the public,” said a July 10 press release from Scott’s office.

While the mayor and solicitor Thompson have maintained that the billing arrangements with Racine and Baker Tilly are confidential, the law department disclosed three pages of exhibits to the Appellate Court yesterday to decry the “massive expenditure of funds” to meet Judge White’s “illegal” order.

• FOR FULL BREW COVERAGE

According to the exhibits, Complete Discovery Source estimates it would cost between $1,947,600 and $3,628,200 for the firm to go through an estimated 2.1 million emails that have been withheld from the IG’s office.

The Manhattan-based data-management firm provided some interesting details in its “Good Faith Cost Estimate.” It said it would require 175 first-level review attorneys to review the documents in 45 days, plus two managing attorneys to review the team’s metrics and implement best practices for quality control.

The first-level attorneys would be responsible to “run documents through aiR Custom Analyses using the established AI PII [Personally Identifiable Information] prompt. This step only extracts PII,” the estimate warns, “it does not deduplicate results, format/normalize PII variations or apply redactions.”

Depending on Claude

For this, the legal staff must rely on Claude, the A.I. tool by Anthropic, to “deduplicate exact PII matches and generate name, address, phone number and DOB variations.”

But creating redaction rules from Claude-formatted PII results is not easy, the company says.

“This is a highly manual process that requires close attention to detail because it directly impacts the accuracy of the automated redactions,” the company said.

Could these estimated 56,000-67,000 hours worth of attorney and A.I. toil be circumvented?

That’s exactly what Cumming says the IG office has done for years – and could do now – if it had direct access to city servers and databases, using the information that’s relevant to its investigations and keeping the rest confidential.

Compared to 175 contract lawyers the law department says it may have to hire, the Baltimore inspector general’s office currently has a grand total of 16 staff positions.

And in contrast to spending up to $3.6 million to pore over records that may have privileged information the IG is barred from disclosing, Cumming’s total budget for FY27 is $2.6 million.

On that low-calorie diet, Cumming says her office has handled 5,000 hotline complaints, conducted over 300 investigations, and identified more than $40 million in waste and fraud in city government since 2018.