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January / February 2010
Volume 22, Number 1

Dial 1-888-ASK-TAC4
By Maria Sprow

More than 10 years after its inception, TAC hotline still offers free, specialized legal insight to county officials

If a mind is a terrible thing to waste, a mind with a law degree is an even more terrible thing to waste – though normally an expensive thing to obtain, even temporarily.

That’s why hundreds of county officials have taken advantage of a priceless legal hotline operated by a team of specialized attorneys and licensed paralegals at the Texas Association of Counties.

Unfortunately, the law, with its formalities, references and amendments, isn’t written for the average layman. But thanks to the hotline, county leaders with legal questions don’t have to spend hours browsing state and federal codes and statutes, digging for answers to specific questions about how to follow all the rules when purchasing big-ticket items, closing a county road or handling a personnel crisis.

Instead, they can have trained legal minds assist their research – for free.

“We were getting many, many calls from people needing help with research and they didn’t have any place to go,” said TAC Paralegal Cathy Gonzales, who helped create the service more than 10 years ago based on a need the Association was feeling from its members. “A lot of the counties at that time didn’t have the money to keep up an actual law library, so we decided to beef up our law library.”

That library is now extensive, and includes Vernon’s Texas Civil Statutes and Codes, which account for all the statutes and codes governing Texas; United States Code Annotated, which includes all the Federal statutes and codes; the Southwestern Reporter – Texas Cases, which covers all the case law for Texas from the appellate courts and the Texas Supreme Court; Texas Jurisprudence III and Texas Digest, both encyclopedia-type research manuals arranged by subject matter and access to Westlaw®, the electronic legal database.

The hotline can serve as a pinch-hitter for county attorneys in areas where they are overworked.

“If you have a small county attorney’s office and it is focused on criminal trials, very often there isn’t anybody there who is specifically assigned to assist officials with their day-to-day questions. They are very happy to know that there is somebody they can call and get assistance in very short order,” said TAC Associate General Counsel Quincy Quinlan, one of the attorneys who responds to hotline inquiries. “Of course, our thoughts don’t have the force of law that the county attorney’s answers can have.”

But in those areas or situations, without the hotline or a costly personal legal library, the only other free alternative many elected officials would have would be something akin to posting a question on a listserve email group and hoping whoever answers knows their stuff. Of course, discussions on listserves are generally best used when conducting non-scientific surveys or collecting opinions. The hotline is a one-on-one resource, and TAC’s attorneys can email or fax any necessary information for future use at commissioners courts meetings or other distribution.

“With the legal hotline, you’re assured that an attorney or someone trained in law is providing the assistance,” Quinlan said.

“People think they know the law, but the one point about legal training is that it trains your mind to think in a certain way. Very often, the law isn’t like common sense or what people think it should be, and you need to be able to have somebody able to look at the nuances,” he added. “A lot of what happens is that we’re given a fact situation that does not easily fit the law, and that is a big part of lawyering, to take a fact situation that does not fit the law as it is written and give people some ideas how to proceed.”

The service is not comparable to advice that could be gained from temporarily enlisting a private attorney. But, private attorneys can charge $200 to $450 an hour for their time, and many won’t have years of county-related law tucked into their resumes.

TAC’s attorneys, having all attended top-notch law schools, also have previous legal experience working for the Office of the Attorney General. General Counsel Robert Lemens has an extensive expertise in election law, having served as director of elections for three different secretaries of state. Lemens also served as Assistant Attorney General to five different state attorneys general; he has been with TAC since 1988. Meanwhile, Quinlan earned his law degree from Stanford Law School and served in the Administrative Law Division of the Attorney General’s office, where he advised several state agencies; his fellow Associate General Counsel Karen Gladney attended the University of Texas School of Law and was director of the Secretary of State’s Elections Division. She also served in the Texas Legislative Council, the Governor’s General Counsel’s office, the Attorney General’s Opinions Division and as an Assistant City Attorney before joining TAC’s staff. In addition, TAC contracts with attorney John Fuller, who spent 19 years working in the AG’s office handling county affairs.

In addition to performing their regular duties, each attorney responds to anywhere from five to eight hotline calls a day, on average, though Gonzales or Paralegal Kristi Shepperson often field some of the calls.

“We don’t have any real specialization areas within the department,” Gonzales said. “Everybody is expected to know everything about everything, or be able to find out everything about everything.”

”We get many calls from county judges and commissioners”, Quinlan said, “but other officials and employees are also frequent callers who make extensive use of the service”.

“Any time officials have questions and need assistance, they can call us,” he said. “We do whatever we can to help officials. All of us here see that as our primary focus.”

In fact, Quinlan often answers inquiries from county attorneys looking for a second legal mind to bounce around theories with, or for help in solving a conundrum.

“Say an issue comes up about a road and the statute doesn’t quite speak to the road. We would look to an attorney general opinion, or three attorney general opinions, and report that nothing the attorney general has written about the statute quite fits, but, based on what