The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) has been engaging costly private legal firms to handle injury claims, yet it remains tight-lipped about the full extent of this multimillion-dollar outsourcing and its ultimate burden on taxpayers.
After The Post filed a Freedom of Information Law request, the MTA disclosed payments exceeding $10 million to six law firms over recent years. However, insiders suggest these figures barely scratch the surface of the financial commitment.
“Millions are being spent on external counsel with no oversight,” commented a lawyer within the MTA’s division responsible for managing such cases.
According to six current and former employees of the MTA’s legal department, the agency increasingly relies on external legal services, a shift from its traditional practice where in-house lawyers would manage these cases.
This shift implies that taxpayers are footing the bill twice: once for the salaries of nearly 60 MTA in-house attorneys, who each earn an average annual salary of $121,000 as of 2024, and again for the outsourced legal services.
MTA Communications Director Tim Minton explained, “With the policies from Washington and relentless lawsuits from opportunistic lawyers, the MTA finds itself under constant legal attack, compelling us to hire the best available attorneys to defend our interests.”
“We have been reviewing how torts litigation is handled, including by in-house lawyers and outside counsel,” he said.
The MTA is meanwhile shelling out for record-high court verdicts and settlements — with a total of $687 million paid out between 2019 and 2024.
That figure doesn’t factor in the hundreds of millions of dollars wracked up from recent record-breaking verdicts handled by outside counsel which are still winding through the appeals process.
Aurora Beauchamp, a cancer survivor, won a staggering $72.5 million judgement in 2024 when she sued for injuries sustained when she was hit by an MTA bus.
Staten Island-based law firm Sciretta & Venterina, LLP, which took the case over for the MTA in 2023, was paid nearly $163,000 by the agency for its work — roughly the annual salary of an in-house agency lawyer with six trial cases a year, according to court documents and billing records obtained by The Post.
In another case, New York-based law firm Armienti, DeBellis & Rhoden, LLP in 2022 took over a lawsuit involving Lamont Powell, a Brooklyn man who lost an arm and a leg after being hit by a subway in 2018.
The resulting judgment of $90 million was one of the largest on record against the MTA, though a judge later knocked down the total award to just under $40 million.
The law firm billed the cash-strapped agency $227,000, according to records obtained through The Post’s FOIL requests.
That’s roughly the equivalent of 18 months of pay for an in-house MTA lawyer who would traditionally handle around 10 trials in that same timeframe, according to agency law-department sources.
“All these large verdicts are because all these cases are being handled by outside counsel,” a source alleged, claiming private lawyers would typically be more focused on billable hours than resolving legal disputes.
Neither law firm responded to a list of questions sent to them by The Post last week.
But exactly how much taxpayers are shelling out for these private lawyers and how many cases they’re taking, remains a mystery — despite repeated Post requests for the data.
More than a year ago, The Post filed a Freedom of Information request for annual billing totals for the selection of six firms that were listed on the MTA’s approved list of outside counsel, as well as for the total amount shelled out for the use of outside counsel.
The MTA said it paid more than $10 million to the six firms between 2019 and 2024 — but claimed it could not provide how much it had spent total on such outside counsel or the number of cases handed over to private lawyers.
Meanwhile, total payroll for the MTA torts department handling such claims was around $7 million in 2024, according to court documents.
The agency’s FOIL department claimed its 30-year-old database was so old that getting such information would be impossible and that it had no such records.
An MTA rep later said the agency does track the amounts and sends them annually to an independent auditor — but did not provide any audit reports upon request.
Of the six firms, Armienti, DeBellis & Rhoden was the highest-paid, earning more than $5 million in taxpayer cash for the time frame, according to records obtained via FOIL. Three other firms were paid more than $1 million each in that five-year span.
Records show spending to those six firms spiked after lawyer Anna Ervolina took over as deputy general counsel for the MTA Law Department in 2021 — from $1.2 million that year to more than $2.6 million in 2023 and $2.1 million in 2024.
Ervolina did not respond to a series of questions and a request for comment.
MTA whistleblowers in the law department warned that the eye-watering amounts the MTA has paid out in settlements and judgments could snowball if the trend continues.
The $687 million paid out between 2019 to 2024 doesn’t even include more recent headline-grabbing payouts mostly helmed by outside counsel that are still in the appeals process.
“You can bring a frivolous claim to the transit authority, and you’ll win. And that’s what plaintiffs are saying,” an MTA lawyer said. “That’s the reputation they have now.”
The MTA’s Office of Inspector General declined to comment but confirmed that its oversight covers the entire agency, including vendors and subcontractors.
Officials from the state comptroller’s office were unable to immediately comment but have conducted audits in the past examining the MTA’s use of outside counsel in collecting tolls, recommending in 2017 that they transition the work in-house.
That recommendation was “partially implemented” as of 2021.
Other whistleblowers alleged that the MTA has even stopped sending its own investigators to the scenes of accidents to collect evidence that could be used to fight future possible fraud in the courtroom.
“The only thing the MTA is investigating now is what’s for lunch,” said a recently retired investigator.
All of the sources said Ervolina has not been in the office for years, despite a return-to-office mandate for state agency employees
“If you’ve been sitting in your house for the last five or six years, you don’t know what is going on in the office — you have no clue,” said a current MTA claims investigator.
An MTA rep said Ervolina has agency approval to work from home but could not specify further.
