<p>The lawyer would have been entitled to “reasonable” attorney’s fees paid by the defendant if his client prevailed in a civil rights action, which is what this was. Or if it was a class action, which was never finally resolved. So it’s not that Robbins’ lawyer is getting 3/4 of the settlement money because they had a deal from the outset he would get that much. It’s that he essentially won the case, and was going to get paid. The $410K is a little less than the hourly-rate bill he submitted. The school district’s lawyers and expert consultants are in line to get paid over $1 million.</p>
<p>Nothing has happened, or will happen it appears, to any district personnel. The person most appropriate to scapegoat – the IT head who set up the procedures, didn’t write anything down, and pooh-poohed privacy concerns without ever raising the issue with her superiors – had retired three months before the whole thing began. The superintendent was new on the job, too; all the critical decisions were made before he was hired. The criminal investigations that had some people drooling with anticipation appear to have terminated with no action taken.</p>
<p>The news stories around here include some muttering by school district people and lawyers that they had a story to tell that had not been aired in the press yet, about why and how the cameras were being used, and that they were anxious to tell it. Anyway, what basically happened is that they settled for the money the insurance company put on the table.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, the school district stopped the old policy within days of the suit being filed, and within hours of the school board hearing about what was happening. A new, much more privacy-oriented policy has been in place since the summer. The tragedy is that all of this could have happened without paying lawyers $1.5 million.</p>