Fulton County is facing another lawsuit seeking back pay for its attorneys. This time it’s a group of former and current employees with the District Attorney’s Office.
The county had a $4.4 million arbitration award against it in 2011 in a suit by 23 staff attorneys with Fulton County State and Superior courts. Now it faces an identical lawsuit by 108 attorneys seeking back pay and adjustments to their pensions and future salaries.
The 2011 award has been upheld by the Georgia Court of Appeals. The county has appealed to the Georgia Supreme Court, but it is unclear if the state’s high court will hear it.
The new complaint revolves around the county’s civil service pay classification. It claims that lawyers with the Fulton County Attorney’s Office have been paid about 20 percent more, around $20,000 annually, than attorneys with similar skills and responsibilities in the District Attorney’s Office.
Regan Keebaugh, one of the attorneys representing the plaintiffs, said it’s unclear how much they will ask for in damages because the amounts vary for each individual, depending on how long they have worked for the county. Keebaugh said they are working through those calculations.
A list of the plaintiffs shows 12 of them started with the county in the 1990s.
“The whole idea behind the civil service system is that people who have the same skills and work with the same level of difficulty and complexity will be paid the same,” Keebaugh said.
Fulton County spokeswoman Ericka Davis said the county does not comment on pending litigation. Fulton Commission Chairman John Eaves also said he was “prohibited” from talking about the suit.
The suit says the county adopted its civil service pay classification system in 1982. Thirteen years later, it hired a consultant to perform a job and pay classification study, which the county commission adopted in 1997. The study remains the basis for pay classifications, according to the lawsuit.
The suit says that despite the study and civil service rules, the county adopted a policy called “premium pay,” which provided a supplement to County Attorney’s Office lawyers but not to those in the District Attorney’s Office.
Premium pay was eliminated in 2005, but the county created a new pay scale for “licensed professionals,” which included lawyers in the County Attorney’s Office, according to the lawsuit. The new scale took the employees’ current salary and added the previous premium pay supplement, the lawsuit says.
That system “was contrived to maintain the status quo with regard to the higher level of compensation paid to attorneys employed by the County Attorney’s Office,” the lawsuit says.
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