June 25, 2026
By Tim Hundt
VERNON COUNTY, Wis. – After months of increasingly contentious debate over how Vernon County should handle its legal work, the Vernon County Board of Supervisors voted June 25 to approve a three-year contract with the La Crosse-based law firm Johns Flaherty & Collins as county corporation counsel, while explicitly leaving the door open to revisit the idea of hiring an in-house attorney.
Supervisors spent more than an hour in sometimes convoluted debate on the legal services question, reflecting frustration over process, costs and the compressed timeline that followed the current corporation counsel’s decision to terminate her contract this spring.
The board ultimately amended the contract to give either side a 90-day out clause, struck an automatic renewal provision and clarified that the county can still explore an internal legal position during the life of the agreement.
“What is becoming alarming to me, and my biggest concern lies in the continued influence of a few that controls the conversation, the discourse and the decision-making process of this whole body,” said Supervisor Alycann Taylor, District 13, who has been the most vocal critic of the process and of shelving a serious look at an in-house corporation counsel earlier this year. “That conversation never happened, and this body never weighed in on the pros and cons of that topic.”
“It might be the best direction to take,” Taylor said of contracting with outside counsel. “I am just not confident that all of this data and this analysis has been adequately vetted.”
History of a slow-burning dispute
Taylor told the board that when the idea of a full-time in-house attorney came before the General Government Committee in March, she and others believed the county should collect “real data” and conduct a pros-and-cons analysis before making any decision.
The question of how Vernon County should structure its legal services has been simmering since at least early this year, when then Administrative Coordinator Cassie Hanan identified the potential for a permanent, on-staff corporation counsel as one of several structural issues the county should examine going forward.
“At that time, Gen Gov recommended, let’s not make a vote on this, let’s take time to analyze and explore and get real data to see the pros and cons of that potential position,” Taylor said. “That was not executed at that Gen Gov meeting. It was a 3–2 vote to just shut down ever bringing a corp counsel on a permanent position.”
Taylor said that meant the question of a county attorney was effectively closed off before the full board could weigh in.
In April, following that committee decision, the county’s current corporation counsel submitted her resignation, putting the county into what several supervisors described as a “compressed” and “urgent” timeline to secure new legal representation.
At the May General Government Committee meeting, supervisors directed the administrative coordinator to issue a request for proposals for contracted legal services. The county received five responses, according to Supervisor Dave Eggen, District 8, who now chairs the General Government Committee.
“We had five responses, and Russell and JFC were clearly the best candidates,” Eggen told the board, referring to Johns Flaherty & Collins and Russell Law Offices, which presented competing proposals to the county board on June 25.
Turmoil and committee changes
Board members acknowledged that the legal services question has been accompanied by internal turmoil on the General Government Committee, which oversees legal affairs and the corporation counsel function.
Supervisor Bruce Kilmer, District 5, noted that membership on the committee changed midstream while the issue was unfolding.
“It’s unfortunate that we had a change in Gen Gov while all this was going on,” Kilmer said. “We all acknowledge that, right. It was kind of like the perfect storm. We’re right in the middle of this and we were backing up against the deadline. Hey, we got to get done.”
Taylor and Supervisor Wayde Lawler, District 14, argued that the March committee vote to dismiss the in-house option came without the basic cost and workload comparisons they had requested, including historic billed hours from outside counsel and a side-by-side look at what an internal attorney could cost.
“It was simply, let’s do due diligence, let’s have an informed conversation before we vote, and that’s all we’re saying today,” Lawler told the full board. “That has not yet happened. We’re still making a decision based on assumptions.”
Lawler said he did not personally care whether the county ultimately chose an in-house or contracted model, but wanted to ensure the board saw the numbers and understood the trade-offs.
“We did not yet see numbers that compared the two,” Lawler said. “We had not yet seen billable hours for the previous year, we had not yet seen what we spent on outside counsel for the previous year. That was our only request.”
Supervisor Paul Wilson, District 16, urged colleagues to remember that General Government had already voted earlier this year to stay with a contracted model, and argued that any reconsideration of in-house counsel would have to be a separate, clearly noticed agenda item. Wilson said the recommendation of the committee should take precedent.
“This isn’t a discussion, it’s not an agenda item for considering full-time at this moment,” Wilson said. “At this moment, contract.”
Supervisor Nathaniel Slack said while it is good to rely on the opinion and recommendations of the committee’s work, it is up to the full board and all supervisors and make the best decision for the county and he felt the process to investigate all options had not been complete.
Compressed timeline and cost questions
Finance Director Anne Lockyer told supervisors that the county’s five-year total for legal services averaged roughly $741,883, with one recent year as high as $195,000, illustrating how costs can swing based on litigation and department needs.
Lockyer and Human Resources Director Trisha Lepke also supplied pay ranges for a potential in-house corporation counsel. Lepke said the county’s wage consultant recommended placing the position on “X” on the pay scale, with base pay ranging from about $112,600 to $124,300, not including benefits. With benefits, the range would rise to roughly $143,980 to $157,430 a year.
Supervisors compared that to recent legal spending. Eggen said the county paid about $96,350 for corporation counsel in 2025, which Lockyer estimated represented around 600 hours of work. Lawler noted that an increase of $75 per hour ($150 per hour under the previous contract as opposed the proposed $225 with JFC) over the current rate, multiplied by 600 hours, would add about $45,000 a year to the county’s legal costs under the new contract.
Supervisor Charles Jacobson, District 11, framed the comparison in terms of hours.
“Under the McGrath (wage) study, it was $150,000 with benefits for a full-time attorney,” Jacobson said. “So that’s 2,080 hours. If we’re paying $225 an hour, $150,000 is only 666 hours. So, for that number of hours difference, if a person wasn’t an expert, they’d have a whole lot of time to research it and become expert.”
Supporters of the contracted model stressed the breadth of expertise a firm can offer compared with a single staff attorney.
Board Chair Lorn Goede, District 3, said one of his main concerns with an in-house hire was expecting one lawyer to handle specialized work across human services, land use, labor law and complex litigation.
Attorneys Brian Weber and Anthony “Tony” Gingrasso appeared for Johns Flaherty, outlining a proposal in which their firm would handle the full scope of corporation counsel work, including county board, committee work and human services–related cases, with backup from additional attorneys in the firm.
“I guess I can speak,” Goede said. “With one person that got referred to other people. There wasn’t one lawyer that is an expert on every subject that would come up. So to have it in a law firm with many different lawyers, they have the expertise to cover it, where one person would… we were going to be farming a bunch of it out anyway, which we already do.”
Supervisor Kevin Walleser, District 4, echoed that concern.
“If we hired an in-house attorney you want to hire somebody for what you need an attorney for now. Certainly, the person who represents us here today is going to be different than someone who’s working at social services,” Walleser said. “How are you going to be able to find somebody that can do all those facets, one person?”
RFP responses and presentations
The county’s RFP drew five proposals for legal services. After committee review, two firms were invited to present to the full county board: Johns Flaherty & Collins of La Crosse and Russell Law Offices, a general practice firm with multiple southern Wisconsin offices and existing county clients.
Weber, who has more than 30 years of practice and serves as attorney for the Village of Holmen and the Town of Campbell, emphasized the need for availability.
“The best ability for any firm to have is availability,” Weber said. “If an attorney is on vacation or gone for a week, you can’t just simply say we’ll get back to you next week with a matter for the county, because as you guys are all well aware, things come up that need to be addressed real quickly.”
Gingrasso said he would focus on human services, guardianships, protective placements, mental health commitments and child support work, where he has already been serving as conflict counsel for Vernon County for roughly two years.
“I have established a rapport with staff in the different departments,” Gingrasso said, listing social workers and child support staff by name. “We were able to accomplish all the things we needed to do, sometimes on a very emergent basis.”
Russell Law’s proposal
Attorney Sam Goaley presented on behalf of Russell Law Offices, which currently serves as corporation counsel for Lafayette County and more recently Richland County, along with multiple town and district clients across southern Wisconsin.
Goaley said Russell Law would be willing to tailor its scope to Vernon County’s needs, attending county board meetings and selected committees, and would not bid for municipal work within Vernon County if hired as county counsel.
“We kind of do what we’re told,” Goaley said. “We don’t have, I’d say, any set parameters of what we think we’re going to do for the county. However you want to use us, we’re available for it.”
General Government’s initial recommendation, shaped during closed session discussions, was to split the work between the two firms, with Johns Flaherty handling human services and Russell Law handling general county work.
On the floor June 25, Eggen moved to amend that recommendation and award the entire contract to Johns Flaherty, citing the firm’s depth and its existing work with Vernon County human services.
“After hearing what JFC said, that they’re not just interested in human services, they would like to represent the whole county,” Eggen said. “So I’d like to offer an amendment to this recommendation to just go with JFC for our county representation as for legal counsel.”
Confusing motions and amendments
From that point, the board’s debate grew increasingly tangled as supervisors layered amendments to both the resolution and the attached contract, questioned parliamentary procedure and briefly became uncertain about what they were voting on.
Supervisor Scott Champion, District 10, laid out a series of contractual changes he said were necessary before he could support the agreement.
Champion targeted an automatic three-year renewal clause, a provision requiring mutual agreement to terminate, and language referring to a “county administrator” rather than an administrative coordinator. He also pushed to align the termination language with the county’s existing corporate counsel contract, which allows either party to end the agreement with 90 days’ written notice and a 60-day acceleration option.
“Back in my business experience, I once got badly burned by an automatic termination agreement, to the tune of an extended agreement for a half million dollars for three more years with a vendor we didn’t want to work with,” Champion said. “From my perspective, automatic renewal clauses, I’ve never since then accepted a contract that had an automatic renewal clause, and I would ask that it be struck from this agreement.”
Champion also raised Vernon County’s purchasing policy, which calls for vendors to be paid within 30 days, and questioned a 20-day payment requirement in Russell Law’s proposal, which that firm agreed to adjust.
Weber, speaking for Johns Flaherty, told supervisors his firm had no objection to any of Champion’s requested changes.
The board added further clarifications at the urging of newly hired Administrative Coordinator Nate Torres, including explicit recognition that the position is an administrative coordinator rather than a county administrator, and that committees as well as commissions are covered in the scope of services.
Torres also sought clarity on travel time and paralegal billing. Weber and Gingrasso said the firm would not bill mileage for trips to Vernon County, and that if paralegals were used, their rate would be $120 an hour, which would generally reduce costs compared with attorney time.
At one point, a supervisor’s call to “call the question” led to a lengthy detour into Robert’s Rules of Order. Taylor questioned the county’s practice of ending debate as soon as someone moved to close discussion, without a vote to do so.
“Does that automatically just stop debate?” Taylor asked. “Shouldn’t there be a vote whether the debate actually stops? Because Robert’s Rules, I think, states that it just automatically doesn’t end debate when somebody wants to stop talking, and yet that’s how we operate here.”
Supervisors and staff consulted a parliamentary “cheat card,” and Corporation Counsel to clarify that ending debate requires a two-thirds vote. The board then re-ran the procedure correctly, ultimately failing to reach the two-thirds threshold and continuing debate.
“It takes two-thirds to end debate,” a staffer confirmed, after several minutes of confusion.
Motion to send back to committee fails
Supervisors Nathaniel Slack, District 7, and others moved to send the entire question back to the General Government Committee for further study, including “hard comparable numbers” on the costs of an in-house attorney versus contracted services.
“I don’t like this process,” Slack said. “I would really like to see more time at committee level put into comparing the current contract, comparing the potential future contract, and comparing what it would cost, like a cost-benefit analysis of a potential full-time staff person. I don’t feel like the upfront homework has been done.”
Supporters of immediate action countered that the current corporation counsel would be gone in three weeks and the county could not risk a gap in representation.
“I’m kind of concerned that we won’t have representation,” Supervisor John Pedretti, District 6, said. “The way our hiring process works, it could take us six months to find… if we decided to go in-house. I personally think we almost have to make sure we’re represented, and then go back… and then do the research, if that’s what they want to do.”
Eggen also pointed to what he described as “a sense of urgency because our current corp is leaving in three weeks, so we need somebody to hit the ground running.”
After prolonged debate and an amendment specifying that any referral back to committee would have to be taken up at General Government’s next scheduled meeting, the motion to send the resolution back failed on an 11–7 show of hands, with one supervisor voting present. Supervisor Kay Stanek joined online to vote no.
Finding a middle ground
In the final round of amendments to the contract, supervisors incorporated many of the safeguards critics wanted, including:
• Striking the automatic second three-year term
• Replacing the mutual-termination clause with a 90-day unilateral termination provision, with an option for the non-terminating party to shorten that to 60 days
• Clarifying that the administrative coordinator will direct the flow of legal requests from departments • Adding committees to the list of bodies the firm will serve • Stating that the firm will not bill mileage, and adding a specific paralegal rate
Taylor and county staff told supervisors that, in practice, department heads had already begun routing most legal questions through the administrative coordinator’s office in recent years, a structure former board leadership adopted to prioritize and manage requests to corporation counsel.
Taylor and others said they could accept contracting with Johns Flaherty & Collins under those terms, as long as the county keeps a live conversation about an in-house model and directs General Government to bring back data on that option.
In the end, the board approved Resolution 2026-34, as amended, to designate Johns Flaherty & Collins as corporation counsel. The voice vote was in favor, with no audible no votes after the lengthy series of amendments and clarifications.
Next steps and lingering questions
Several supervisors said they still want the county to fully vet the in-house attorney option. Jacobson asked that future agendas include regular updates on that discussion so it does not “get lost in the shuffle,” and Lawler requested that General Government add a clear review of corporation counsel structure and costs to an upcoming agenda.
Taylor said her objections were less about which firm the county hires and more about ensuring the board engages in transparent, data-driven decision-making that includes all supervisors, not just a few committee members or the board chair.
“This is not about the gentlemen who have presented to us,” Taylor told her colleagues. “I find their skill set would be great, and that is not what this is about. This is about our inability to keep working our processes.”
For now, Vernon County will move forward with a contracted corporation counsel who can begin immediately as the current counsel departs. But the 90-day escape clause and explicit interest in revisiting an in-house option mean the broader question of how the county wants to handle its legal affairs is likely to return to the agenda in coming months.
“We have somebody qualified that’s ready to go that can carry us for now,” Supervisor Greg Lawton, District 17, said. “And then do we relook at it… that gives us some time.”
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