starting at six thirty the firm of dutch williams brooks trances and holland at seven kopelman page p c at seven thirty mieris and harrington l l p at eight o'clock murphy has he told me mispronouncing many of them and then following the interviews will convene and we have standard questions which i'll explain in and the rating system so hopefully at the end of this meeting we can put our minds together  that the other candidates aren't sitting in the room as a courtesy professional courtesy what we handed out the questions with some room for notes following that is a a rating sheet  firms and then the last page is a excel spreadsheet matrix that loraine it put together that kind of summarizes the bits and pieces from all six of the packages that we got so before  because the six firms and even if it's a half hour that's three hours i do have a prepared statement that i want to read each of the firms just to kind of get a guideline so that nice know what's what's expected so being a little after seven thirty if i mean sigh six thirty if you want to come up to the table thank you and before you introduce yourselves i'm just going to read a prepared statement that i'm going to read to every from that comes and it's a minute long on behalf of fox for a board of selectmen i want to say thank you for your interest and effort in providing a proposal to offer town council services to our town of we have received your application packets and have had time to review it prior to this meeting tonight we are interviewing six firms and we have allocated one half hour to each firm time will be structured so we can allow ample time for your for our firm as well  as the other candidates that come in this evening our standard format will be as follows you will be given ten minutes for an opening opening introduction to describe your firm's qualifications and perhaps the reason that your firm is best suited for fox bros needs as our town council following your ten minute introduction will be fifteen minutes of q and a each each of our five members will ask you one question and we will not ask you a follow up question and we will use that time to listen following the fifteen minutes of q and a you begin five minutes at the end to offer a closing statement following tonight's interview our board will convene before we leave tonight in decide which firm or firms to invite back for a second follow up interview where we can discuss the possibility of an agreement in more detail this is a public meeting however public participation will not be allowed should the public have comments from this interview process time will probably be provided at our next meeting during citizens input foxborough cable access t v is broadcasting this interview live for our residents at home so if you could use the microphone and speak up that would be appreciated so again thank you for the time and with this introduction please proceed duran's from george williams with me is kim salon who is one of our trial lawyers and rod hoffman who's a contract caramel it's an economic development attorney i think we're known quantity for fox but if i had to summarize what we stand for i would use four words independence continuity stability and accomplishments and let me say something about each of those words that we used to describe us were independent in that we feel quite free to say no and when no needs to be said outside counsel we see our job not just going along but when something is wrong or something is illegal to stand up and say you can't do that we have tried to do that in the past without being disagreeable we see sometimes when we're dealing with some of the players here in foxbor that they are looking for the best deal they can get and our job is to get the best deal that we can get for the time and for us taxpayers so there will be disagreements there will be areas where there are competing goals with each side trying to accomplish the best for in one case for for the private interests and the other for the public but we can do so without being disagreeable and we can do so in a way that keeps the dialogue going are independent in the sense that our work is our home not something pushed upon us not something that we're lobbied for we understand we report i used the word continuity describe us continuity because we are to use a football analogy we're in the middle of a drive down the field we're heading for the end zone on the a couple of big issues we're getting first that we're making progress we represent continuity of those goals by the time and a real opportunity to score on those  because part of continuity we see ourselves as part of a team and our method of operation is to be part of a team and to put teamwork as an important characteristic for example and in recent negotiations we have a team that has the d p w superintendent we have the finance director we have the time manager we have the representative of the water and sewer commission excellent team but we're part of that team and we see our role as being part of that team a lot has happened in the last year if we look back a year ago last june who could've foresaw everything that would have happened to this community in that year we see that this is a time that the community needs the bill it needs healing needs continuity and we represent that and the fourth word that i used to describe us was accomplishments we have done a lot for fox but we're proud of what we've done for foxborough and we're proud of fox for being part of all of these things that got done seven this community embarked on patriot place and back in two thousand or one nine hundred ninety nine they embarked on having the only n f l franchise in the wingless so in essence we see two foxborough as together we see a small town and very much of the small town a small town that should be preserved on the other hand we see a world class unison pilot that has the same problems and the same issues that the city of boston house and it is in that context where we have to both be counsel for small time and yet have the resources to deal with unexpected last year as i say we didn't foresee what was going to happen this year and because a lot happened the time as a time and we as your lawyers ultimately were prepared to handle those challenges and the community did him a lot of challenges and did come through it and we think we helped that was through hard work preparation teamwork education and expertise here are some specific things to just to remind you of the role that we played just to just to keep you on track you get about a minute left for the opening well rather than go through that let me in ten minutes i won my first suit before i graduated from law school and that was over twenty six years ago and i have successfully maintained that record i represent of boards of appeals plenty of boards conservations commissions  even strangers planning boards building inspectors zoning enforcement officers i was instrumental in the litigation involving western sampson which you all know was a thirty be litigation which actually when you crunch the numbers we all know what the original estimate for that project was be on the what the bids came in had west and sampson been successful in their ranks and they were not we would have gotten bids substantially higher than initially we had received in the first round i applaud d p w director for making that decision it was a tough row to hoe and he stood his guns and you know what he was right and it saved this town a lot of money and  instrumental in making sure that weston sampson was not successful in the preliminary injunction and if i crunched the numbers i'm talking about over three quarters of a million dollars right now as we speak never mind had we chosen them and all the things that might have happened and goodness knows whether the oak street water to treatment facility would have been built at all i also do plaintiff's work i do plaintiffs work for towns i successfully negotiated a settlement for quotes was approximately one hundred thousand dollars we walked away and that settlement was over a half a million dollars for the town so not only are we on the defensive we're also on the off  interesting way enough not only did they end up agreeing to violations in the end with their with the assistance of some pretty heavy hands here at which whims and others i assure you they made it to certain violations withdrew dismissed c appeal and paid the town ten thousand dollars so not only are we defensive we're also on the off chance for the town i am familiar with chapter seventy nine land acquisitions and firearms licensing i do wetlands regulations i practice in the state court not only in the district court but on the in the spirit court and do a lot of work in the land court i'm very familiar with the land court judges you have got land use issues i'm your girl no offense to anyone i don't want to say my age i'm going to have to stop you there and ah hopefully you can pick up the rest of the question and answer great thanks joe we got a long night so ok in the time keeping them next person i'm going to give to somebody else because i feel horrible about doing it in five questions in randomly we kind of went around so linda you want to ask you first question and i'll just say this fifteen minutes of five questions to three minutes each ok proud of settling a lawsuit for five times what the insurance company initially initially offered it was even to get close to replacing the v c to flooring in this particular town that i represent and i and i i consider that a very significant victory and i know the citizens of the town really appreciated it thank you you're welcome jenny question number two regarding commercial development describe the breadth of your affirms  major commercial development on behalf of the palette i give specific examples describing the complexity of the project's local impacts and then describe the outcome please i'm rod i do contracting in and and develop some of that of the development work their development is a broad category in so you know people in our team back in the office handle the zoning and that sort of thing let me describe one project that i'm working on now which will give you some idea of  think out of the box and you know there's a trite phrases but sometimes that's the exactly the right answer i'm working now on a on a project for the city of taunton which is and they're doing  and it's not the casino that they are it's a solid waste management facility they their landfill is about to close right now they plain pay nothing to you know dump in the landfill that's going to that's going to end shortly and they're trying to figure out how do we do this and not take a big hit to the budget they put out an r f p a couple years ago and  ended up ultimately sort of two different tracks one proposal was very conventional would bring the solid waste to town transferred put it on a rail car ship it out to a landfill in upstate new york you know easy certainly permit able but expensive because it's you know that costs the city's cost would be a million and a half or something that's not something any town certainly not tonton would like to look for an alternative proposal is some really interesting technology that takes solid waste and transforms it into gasoline i mean who knew and so instead of taking solid waste and paying to dump it you get an end product that's quite valuable and you know so that you know the the fun and the to the city would share in the profits an excellent deal but issues you know it's a new technology will d p approve it how do you handle this now the permeating is is it's a it's a brave new world and so we went through sort of a parallel process and it was it was quite divisive in the consulting engineer said wait a second you know the right answer here is not to take an either or vote now but see if if we can get the city to tell the two contractors to work together to come up with a joint proposal  and and i had some ideas of how that might work it's those kinds of contracts are exempt from thirty b c you have an alternative there and we are now in the process of those two  contractors you know working together to come up with a joint proposal and that's you know that's the idea that we came up with and it's dealing with people you know who were you know two weeks ago competitors to try to get them to work together and you know it's not done yet but all of a sudden they're getting that idea and if it works it's going to be an absolute home run for the city and that's kind of all right let's about this problem and how do we solve it for the benefit of municipality you know even if we have to encourage the contractors to do what they were and take intending to do so that's my story because i just had that in our proposal we list one hundred twelve different economic development projects of different kinds that when i don't think is listed here which would be  hundred thirteen the second there's one hundred twelve here any one of which we could talk ten fifteen minutes on successful projects that benefit of the communities for which they were done thank you question three with lorraine when the board of selectmen asked you for a legal response please explain when you think the requested advice should be in writing when do you think  verbal response should suffice please state your opinion as to the difference between the two i guess i'll try answering not part of that turns on how frequently are advised ends up being on the front page of the newspaper  we give things in writing and the next thing we know it's in the hands of the opposing counsel it's in the hands of the newspapers and so on we get quite reluctant about putting things in writing if there is due respect for the attorney client privilege and for executive session and the like we put in writing we label them as foxborough advisory opinions and we give a number to it and we have a book in the office which of these opinions that we've given and writing are kept marital order we give those on issues that we think has some long term value where the issue might come up again that you all may want to refer to it suggest to our times that you keep our opinions and you number you keep them in order just the way we do in a book in the selections office because these are these tend to be things that come up over and over again so that instead of having to call every time with the same question you can go to the opinion and there will be something that's intended to be guidance going forward the things that we do not put in writing generally our first quick questions and quick answers it's an hour before meeting can we change the location of the meeting if we tried to say hold on a second we could have to give your written response on that your meeting would have started without your being able to take the action necessary so we will give quick answers to those questions and there are a lot of questions that are particular hope a meeting or question  this an appropriate subject for executive session and so on that we will field an answer quickly if the requester which would usually be the town manager the way things are theoretically supposed to work you all voted that the requests go to the town manager and then the town manager contacts us but in an emergency if you're sharing a meeting and you've got to figure something out co oftentimes they do budgets i'm sorry off times i do budgets for litigation expenses and i project out what i think is going to cost litigation is kind of a strange animal because you never know what the that i'm not sure how you would do it on any particular assignment that you got but it certainly would be an estimate of hours an estimate of tasks an estimate of how many times we have to be in court what kind of issues we see coming up where we see the dispositive motions and that kind of thing going and so i just found the quest no problem just supplement that by saying that we've worked for three years under a fixed flat rate of services we are proposing to go back to such a system here going forward if we have a long term commitment from you we can provide the flat rate not thinking of anything in particular but you know when i make my general policy with clients you know if i make a mistake i'm on the phone right away and say wait you know i went wrong on this one and here's how we can how we can fix it or you know how do you want me to fix it i'll do whatever it takes and sword and and corrected him it won't cost you anything and i talked to him today and we've been he's been a client for twenty five years because you know when you when you're willing to say that  people were i found people respect that because everybody makes mistakes and question is how do you deal with it thank you so you get a few minutes left actually right on target so if you want  during that time i was appointed a special town council hired by the insurance company to sixty five different communities throughout the commonwealth their regular town council wasn't chosen by the insurance company we were chosen by the insurance company i briefed and argued over sixty successful dispositive motions primarily in the federal court there's a lot of land use taking scase is i did a lot of allegations regarding excessive use of force eccentric cetera so while i've been with george williams entities and i consider it a feather in my cap to have been appointed a special town council for sixty five different communities within the commonwealth that's what i was going to say before i just had a sort of a closing piece here we are committed to the year but we are one hundred percent committed to the time we've demonstrated that many many times i'm committed to public service you all know we haven't gone through our backgrounds but you all know that i hold public office well public office for decades i understand what it means to hope public office i understand the for the sure responsibility that we all have to the people of the time and i'm committed and enthusiastic about foxborough i really care a welcome thank you before you can introduce yourselves what we did is we have six firms and wanted to do a prepared statement so everyone has the same information starting so if you bear with me it's about a minute just to get you on the same page  selectman i want to say thank you for your interest and effort in providing a proposal to offer town council services to our town of foxborough we have received your application packet and have and have had time to review it prior to this meeting tonight we are interviewing six firms and we have allocated one half hour to each firm time will be structured so we can allow ample time for our firm for for your firm as well as the other candidates are standard format tonight will be as foll be given ten minutes for an opening introduction to describe the firm's qualifications and perhaps the reasons that your firm is best suited for foxborough needs as town council following your introduction there will be a fifteen minute question and answer session each of our five members will ask you one question these questions are all the same for all of the firms we will not ask follow up questions and we will use the time to listen to what you have to say following the q and a session you will be given five minutes at the end off for closing statement following tonight's interview a board will convene before we leave tonight in decide which firm or firms to invite back for a second follow up interview where we can discuss the possibility of an agreement in more detail this is a public meeting however public participation will not be allowed should the public have comments from the this interview process prepared time will be provided at our next meeting during our citizens input foxborough cable access t v is broadcasting this interview live for our residence at home so if you could please speak speak into the microphone again thank you for your time and so with this introduction please proceed ok i'm going to be giving as the very brief overview and then  it we only do municipal law we represent over one hundred twenty cities and towns in the commonwealth and we special to another one hundred the the of the effect of that for you is there is a lot of horse power to our f and you get we don't have to recreate the wheel we have scanned over a million hours of our work and we can quickly give you answers to your  questions in other words it's not only less expensive it's faster let me give you one quick example if you're going to build or put an addition or build a new building whether be a police station a library and say you're doing a library we have you can't use the a i a contracts you do not want to use them so we do is we have our own set the we keep up to date if there's new laws we make sure ours is absolute perfect which they are and you can go out and we can type in town a fox and in one tenth of an hour you have your big dogs and there is nothing better than what we use and the other the construction companies know our firm and the alternative is if they give you there isn't then you have the market up it's been hours negotiating the stuff so there's a lot of value to that now i recognize that costs are important and i i really put together a fees an expense response rate that i hope you'll look at carefully because i think it will work you i did i also didn't analysis of this morning of our towns who are similar in size to you and i found one town that was seventy five persons away from your population two thousand and ten population and we have for the past three years done that work for approximately eighty thousand a year which includes labor out of pocket disbursements and all fees for legal it's kind of webster by the way and i look at this current year a budget one hundred thousand and we have eleven months into it so i divide the month amount by eleven that we build and then multiply that amount by twelve and were under that were about sixty eight thousand for the year so i think you'd you know as as letter indicated we we do all municipal work we don't handle private work with a very small real estate practice that's kind of an adjunct to the missile work but what we do is we work very closely with all of our cities and towns mostly towns we have a very dynamic practice we concentrate on the very specific issues that all towns are facing pretty much every town goes through very similar issues but every town is unique and we try to treat each town as unique entity because clearly you have your own issues in your own concerns and the way we work it and in order to give you that that personalized treatment to give you exactly the specified information and deal with your specific issues we assign a lead counsel for the community that would in this case be me marc rich i've been practicing miscible law for over twenty years started off as an assistant city solicitor for the city of everett and wound up coming to goldman a page when it was to to reach out and expand my practice and what we do is we provide lead counsel and then behind that lead counsel we have a firm of forty five attorneys you would have access to every one of those attorneys all the specialists in land use election law we have to have you know the top elections attorney lauren goldberg i believe works with your own town clerk who is a former chief counsel to the elections division we have experts in litigation land use real estate  any any of the any of the practice areas that you come in contact with licensing issues we have a complete licensing department and we pride ourselves on having experience in every area every facet of in a simple law and we want to make sure is that in order to provide this service you without putting you in a position where you're seeing a different face every time when you're dealing with different people want to make sure that you know who your town council is you know your go to person is it's that person's responsibility my responsibility to then make sure that you have the specialists lined up to handle your business but you only have to ask one person for the question if we did my job to make sure that you get the right answer if not for me from an expert in the field but then when you come back you come back to me i make sure that all of your work is coordinated i review it for the communities i'm responsible for i review every single bill every single entry to make sure that you're getting exactly the service you want i get copies of every opinion and every e mail that goes to my clients and i make sure that i'm there for you i don't handle trial work i don't i don't tie myself up in court i have a team of experts who can do that but if i was doing that i wouldn't be there for you i wouldn't be available to you twenty four seven i carry my cell phone at all times it's always on my my wife is always thrilled when on vacation the phone rings i have to take those calls because you know the town hall is twenty four seven even even if your doors are closed i know you folks get the calls i get the calls from selectman at all times because obviously you get the calls at all time there are times when things come up after hours and i still remember the time when we had a thanksgiving crisis we had a town that was building a new field they were all set for their or their their big thanksgiving day rivalry football game and the state was going to allow them to open their new field and i had to get on the phone with their architects and contractors and say look my folks are here for the giving dinner if i have to come down and deal with your problems could be big trouble we're opening that field and we got that field open but we have to we have to be available for just those reasons same thing we had a water main break right on on another holiday day and i had to go right down to meet with the d e p t on a holiday we augment all convene but it happens that's what municipalities are about that's what we pride ourselves on we all love what we do we talk about having the sense of the mission we love working for me as a palace because we feel like we're wearing the white hat with they're with you in the trenches when you've got litigation and you've got significant issues coming up we are there fighting right alongside you we know that have towns are principled and take princip positions and we work with you to make sure those principles are carried forward we also work with you when it's time to reach compromises or determine what is the best compromise on a contract action or a construction project to make sure the project moves forward that it's done fairly that you're within budget but that you can resolve it without having extra cost an extra litigation so where they're watching the bottom line for you watching you or your interest your concerns and we make your concerns our concerns we just we want to be there for you personally we want to have our team available for you and we are frankly we think we have the best team in in the state we represent over a third of the state we represent a regional transit authorities we're involved in so many different areas because we have the expertise and we have the backup of documents that would be instantly available to you and a letter talked about that the contract documents we have worked very hard on those contracts so that when you do have a proposal you have an issue coming out we can immediately find the right document if you have opinion letters that we've developed over many many years many of which can be adapted so that you have instant availability of information for the same time we don't give you cookie cutter service or tailor our service to you and your specific needs and exactly what your issues are they become our issues we want to just be there for you as your town council thank you thank  litigation all of think about from from my perspective i do a lot of environmental work we had a situation we were dealing with a major site assignment for a trip for a transfer station would have been a significant impact on the town and one of the issues that th y came to us is as we were going through the site assigned process working with the board of health and working through a side assignment we had a an issue arise where the applicant could not meet one of the citing criteria and that forced us into into a situation advise on the board of health we had to deny that site assignments and the the applicant obtained a letter from the department of protection which drafts the very regulations we were dealing with and that that applicant presented a letter saying no we were grandfathered we don't have to address that that piece of information on under the regulations because the d p s determine that that is not required and under the under statute that's that's allowable process we countered and said no you know you you are subject to these specific regulations they can't be waived we went through the spirit court over to the appeals court and dealt with pending supreme judicial court legislation on that matter and as a result we were able to get a favorable decision for for the town that allow the town that support the town's position and result in a situation where the applicant essentially had to withdraw their application and had to come back and make a significantly different approach the town that was much more beneficial to the town but ultimately had a significant beneficial impact i bring that one up because that's what i specifically handle all the way through the appeals court let me just add one thing because this is this would be an interesting take on it we had the case of milbury versus miles versus millbury in the superior millbury and we won the case in there was appealed to the appeals court and we lost the case the board of selectmen felt they didn't want to spend any money to appeal it further to the supreme judicial court and to us it was important because it it was a zoning issue for all towns so we said we do it for free and we wanted the estrace see so we care about what we do because important for all of our towns and we also represent the when the leading  we actually get involved in a large number of commercial developments again to think of one that i was involved with myself in the city of woodburn we were involved in the industrial plex site the fascinating thing about the industr the the city and involvement with a and the e p a in dealing with the hazardous waste site and also dealing with the potential responsible parties and the trust groups to reach a development point so that that property could be reuse we're talking about a site that was a former w r grace site that was so significant featured in a civil action and now is a significant operating facility where there's there's a target there are restaurants there are a number of facilities and in addition to the headers and we were in train station we got involved to make sure that the future development would be assured that the site would be properly cleaned up that public health and safety would be protected and that the ground be available and appropriately developed for for commercial use and it's become quite a development site for the the the city of woodburn we're also on a regular basis get involved with cities and towns doing a more routine developments obviously when when developers come in to put in large malls and strip malls and have to do roads road infrastructure work we get involved in putting together the agreements that allow the infrastructure to go in on behalf of the city or town most of our towns get involved with the circumstances where the developer is required to put in infrastructure improvements lighting electrical  other utilities and we get involved in putting together the very agreements that allow the infrastructure to go in and then be presented and provided directly to the town so we make sure to protect the municipalities so that they they are involved in the process the extent of effective use of property because there's a partnership between the municipality and the developers jenny you want to as a third question when the board is asked you for a legal response please explain when you think they requested about it should be in writing when do you think a verbal response should suffice and please state your opinion as to the difference between the two that's actually an excellent question we we obviously are are faced now with with with three options we've got the verbal request we have the written request and then the e mail request which is somewhere between the two and what we found is generally an oral oral response is not a very effective tool because it's it's very hard to capture the recollection of what someone said to you you ask a question there are detailed circumstances that go behind that the the question and when you get a verbal answer very often it in the nuances can be lost when that's translated before a board such as yourself it's important just as you mean open to the open meeting law it's important you have documentation in front of you when we write opinions we always back it up we have a very specific format on how we write our opinions that specify the question the circumstances behind the question that restate the question and provide you with the answer and in my opinion a formal letter as is required any time there is a significant fact pattern that has to be developed and explained if it's simply a question of is this kind of contract subject to bidding or is this kind of project subject the prevailing wage law a brief email response a very brief response can be provided and in that case in oral response might be appropriate but any time you have a fact pattern that relies upon you know that this action occurred subsequent to that something else happened it could be a dispute with a contractor where there are number of change or is involved in a project and have you have you reached a point where there's a breach of a contract and  the the contractor has been called in whether it whether to access a performance bond their number of factors or interpret ing a as zoning bylaws an example we have to go through the facts of the use of the property any changes in use expansions and use any time that there are facts that have to be developed in my opinion that should be reduced to two writing so that you have that in front of you and you can rely upon that if i put it in writing i stand behind it if i give you an oral it's very i've heard too many times my own words repeated back to me and they're slightly off and you know that slight change can change the entire tenor of the opinion and i wouldn't want you sitting at this table especially if you have a meeting where an attorney is not present and you're trying to rely on opinion and if you get it slightly wrong then then you don't look good and i don't look good in my job is to make you look good and the best way i can do that is to provide a written opinion before you but then goes on to the public record it's part of the public documents that anybody can see it and it's beneficial to you it's beneficial to the public and law at large so generally my preference is to put something in writing to sign it and then you can rely upon it do you give binding single feet quotes for work on specific projects if so please give some examples it's always hard for me because all you can do is estimate and we have a lot of experience but you have to concept and by the way is the lower of time because we want to have the town to have some skin in the game to the extent that we don't get the what if questions but that being said you know it there are a number of times when  municipalities and obviously the bottom line is a very sensitive issue have to know what is what is what it projects going to cost and even as an example today i got a i got an e mail from one of my town amiss traders outlining a project that we've been involved with it has to do with the community preservation act project large piece of property and whether the town in developing this property will be able to clear cut that property is there conservation commission implications we've written several opinions on this there have been fights back and forth with  opposition groups as to whether the town can proceed with us and now they're at the point where they're going back again the town is the applicant for its own conservation commission and the town is straight or specified i'm going to give you authorization to do this many meetings i'd like to know a quote how much will it cost me to have you go to these meetings and provide the backup and i will sit down and review and we have a very good handle on how long these meetings generally go we can estimate the length of the meeting we  estimated looking at the issue what what the research time will be and what what will be required to put together any further opinions and we will develop and appropriate cost estimate for that and then you know if we give a cost estimate we will stick by it is generally our preference to give you the benefit of the hourly rate because generally we're going we're going to watch our bottom line as well we were not going to try to generate work just to reach the point of some quote if we quote you something and we can do it for less we're going to if less i'm going to bill you less we're never going to work up to a quote and by the way we do give quotes on litigation costs but there's really two things you need to know one what's the likelihood of success in the world take to get there  in the final question please tell us about a mistake you made in advising a town how you notified the town of the mistake in how you corrected  situations where you know a town has has gone into a a project and you know we advise them the best example i can think of is with respect to the public bidding process and determining what's the appropriate threshold for a bidding process the reality is you know unfortunate usually that the project changes and so we have to revise the advice depending on the changing of the projects in  general when an issue comes up we work so closely with the towns that we will discuss it with them immediately and let them know that the changed circumstances have changed the aspect of the project change the the scope of the opinion so very often that's why it's so important when we write these opinions to provide the facts if we're talking about a particular piece of property in a particular zoning opinion and that's another one where these things come up and we specify it's our understanding that one one this is a good specific one we i was dealing with a high school project and the issue was whether that the property in the back of this high school which we  planning on doing our addition on to was subject to article ninety seven of the constitution the the provision that preserves property for open space and conservation purposes and it's a perpetual restriction on the use that property if one wants it's article ninety seven it's protected forever unless you get other permission from the an act of the state legislature and this situation based upon the information and the history of this project we  opine that this was article ninety seven protected property and was not a start was not article as an protect property because of what we could talk about the prior use doctrine and how the property had been used previously and we were then  rought before bill party over at the attorney general's office who is the the attorney tasked with overseeing article ninety seven and he totally disagreed and he said i have information that shows that only a limited portion of this property was ever used for anything other than conservation purposes and while you talk about an educational use it really wasn't the kids may have run down the hill but it was always at parkland and we work very carefully to to bring together a full argument to benefit the community to show that in fact was our was not article ninety seven the problem was the attorney general enforces this was not willing to budge on this and what we did we met with the with with the this was a city mayor we met with the mayor we brought  in the representatives from the school department and the neighborhood and we all got together we said look we can we can fight about this and it will get drawn out and we'll deal with the attorney general's office and it'll become a very nasty piece of litigation if the attorney general's already saying he's not going to go by my opinion he's going to sue the city and he's going to make sure this proper is protected but we could do instead is we can put together a piece of special legislation to deal with this property only and in it we will specify the types of uses and how we're going to balance the educational use and the open space use and wind up with a win win for all parties and by bringing in the neighborhood and getting the neighborhood to agree we wound up with a win win the attorney general was absolutely thrilled with what we presented we brought to the legislature and it was passed and interestingly it was passed after that mayor lost the election and the new mayor who didn't like this deal opposed it and the legislature passed it anyway and that was how we resolved when i wouldn't call a mistake what i would call is so fact sensitive that depending on which side of the facts you looked at and what it was our job to say to our client you've got to recognise that the facts you're on a knife edge on these facts and we caution that from the beginning and we can make that argument but if instead of of hanging on to that argument and standing on that knife edge we can reach a compromise that will benefit everybody bring the public in bring the opposition in bring the state in and satisfy  everybody and we felt that was a terrific win avoided litigation it was a relatively low cost and very high profile victory for the community at large trying throughout as i think this these were great questions to give you my own personal experiences if we brought any other attorney in from our office they would give you a myriad of their own experiences each one of us has dealt with a number of different issues because we live in cost effective manner we maintain our our library up to date both electronically and on paper for those of us who still like to read and we we want to be there we want to be the primary counsel because we feel that our our mission is to provide that level of service to provide effect cost effective efficient service that puts you on the right track we we know the law we know the issues and we look forward to learning the very specifics of each community and then applying what we know to what you need so that you have that specific service we make sure again that we were available to you we welcome attending your meetings obviously part of the proposal includes your town meeting we do town meetings you know all across the state and we consider that the big show will get to go there before the entire community and we want to make sure that your town meeting runs perfectly from helping you with your warrant all the way through to the motions and the presentation a town meeting itself so that when we when you come out from your biggest activity the whole year you feel good about that we do this in a cost effective manner because we have been doing it for so long but we don't do in a cookie cutter manner we do it with your specific issues and your specific concerns and interests in mind i welcome calls like i said at any time especially from each of the selectmen and i don't i don't charge for those calls because generally you're going to be calling me saying i've got a concern and that those are the kinds of things you should feel free to call about but in terms of managing a legal budget you need to make sure that there's a proper conduit that that is a proper way a waste gate essentially to make sure that the calls that come to us have been authorized and we only give the opinions to those people who are supposed to be asking us the questions so that we don't get questions coming from folks that are not authorize we make sure that the only people we talked to would be any of the selectmen pursuant to a selectman determination of how to use town council and through your your proper channels to make sure that we give answers to the people who need the answers and we don't we don't squander your limited resources very sensitive to that so thank you very much for your time  welcome to foxborough well thank you thank you before you introduce yourselves i'm just going to get prepared we have six interviews we put together just to prepare for pared one minute overview to get everyone  great behalf of foxborough board of selectmen i want to say thank you for your interest and effort in providing a proposal to the to offer town council services to our town of foxborough we have received your application packet and have had time to review it prior to this meeting tonight we are interviewing six firms and we have allocated a half hour to each firm time will be structured so we can allow ample time for your firm as well as the other candidates our standard format tonight is as follows he will be given ten minutes for an opening introduction for describe your firm's qualifications and perhaps the reasons that your firm is best suited for foxborough foxborough his needs as our town council following your introduction there will be a fifteen minute question and answer each of our five members i will ask you one question and we will not ask a follow up question on that and we will use this time to listen following the question and answer you will be given five minutes at the end of the session to offer a closing statement following tonight's interview our board will convene before we leave tonight in the side which firm or firms to invite back for second follow up interview where we can discuss the possibility of an agreement in more detail this is a public meeting however public participation will not be allowed foxborough cable access t v is broadcasting this interview live for our residents at home so if you could just please speak into the microphone speaking again thank you for your time and so at this introduction welcome and please proceed ok thank you  i am the founding partner of me r s and harrington and with me is my partner christopher heap who is at the mainstay of our land assist your town because of that fact and that is to say when you are interviewing candidates for a town council an important question to ask is not is this a big firm or is this a small firm but how many towns that's what i want to have lawyers protect i think you might know and some of our competitors that they're stretched a lot thinner than that we don't think that's that's a good thing for the town  we want you to understand so that because of the of our size and because of the unique relationship with the town council that you will be a very important client of our firm it's easy to get lost in a bigger a areas of specialization that they that they concentrate their practice on but one thing that we do that's different from most other firms is that we meet together every day at noon time for lunch and use that time to share what's what's going on with our various clients issues that have come up in the course of the day problems that that need input from more than one person so that we function truly as a team and everybody pretty much knows what everybody else is doing and when necessary needs to be brought in and can get up to speed pretty quickly because they've already heard the basics of it at one of our staff meetings and that means that you're never going to get a phone call from somebody who doesn't know anything about your town or doesn't know anything about your particular problem because the lawyer that you thought you were going to get is you know not available if much as i like to say i'm always available twenty four seven it is true that i do casually have to do other things and when i'm not  available you can be sure that the person that you're talking to in my stead actually knows what's going on in your town so it's important to know when you're dealing with a firm how many wars are serving how many towns and how how many of those lawyers are actually involved in what you're doing and i think we may be unique in that regard the other thing i think that that we took a chance are aware that we applied the first round even though we didn't qualify and the reason we did that is because we have we think we have special expertise in dealing with large development headquarters for i b m i recently took over some property in in littleton but we've also been involved in hired a special council for dealing with plans and so when i when we saw your hour of pain we said well we'll take a chance maybe they'll be interested enough to have us come in even though we don't meet their minimum qualifications so thank you for for  doing that we we think we offer something unique in that area and and we hope we were able to convey that in the materials that we provided to you ready to serve you as soon as you're ready to have us we think we would be a great contributor to your town and we hope  that we make it through this round and get invited back thank you robin just one clarification for the people that are listening from home when you say you don't meet our minimum qualifications you actually do we republic five questions about two or three minutes just a question one describe the most significant litigation involving your firm has town council for municipality what were the subjects of the litigation the outcomes in your firm's contribution to the outcomes e number of years ago we massachusetts had electric utility deregulation and there were a spate  of power plant proposals you know a number of different in a number of different towns around the commonwealth i was contacted by the town council franklin and i asked if could would i be willing to serve as a special town council with respect to this and i said sure i'd be willing to do that when does the hearings start and he said oh it started this morning  of material and ask reasonably intelligent questions but as we went along it seemed to be better the ultimately the facility was approved and the town of franklin peeled and that appeal goes directly to the supreme judicial court so we we argued the case before the supreme judicial court and  based on the oral arguments and he decided that the better part of discretion was the better part of valor and offered the town seven million dollars to drop its opposition now i understand this is a facility that is well over the town line in bellingham it's not in franklin at all and while the town was come principally concerned about the air pollution blowing were just now talking about traffic impacts and we ultimately negotiated an agreement with them so that all of the track traffic involving instruction whatever had to go around franklin and  kind of what you just went through and i took his best question nine hundred forty units of residential development and four hundred thousand square feet of office space and fifty thousand square feet of commercial retail space and the when when we arrived on the scene in an hopkinton we just been appointed town council and we discovered that the developer had made a whole series of promises to whole lot of different boards and residents and what have you and was expecting in return for the town to a adopt oh when i arrived on the scene and said you know that's really not going to be in the best interests of the town to do it that way so we had entered into a long and protracted debate in that lee creating a master plan special permit process that had the developer has now gone through gotten an approved master plan special permit and is now going through site plan for the each of the different components like site by review all that chris is the principal reviewer of of the various applications and provides legal support to the to the planning board as they go through these various permits and  adequate we need to be able to make a judgement a lot of times questions most most common preface is i have a simple question for you not as simple as as somebody might think but if it's truly simple i think that that often suffices nowadays it's almost as fast for us to write us an email response back there as as to give you a verbal response and truthfully we in most circumstances that's what we would want to do even when i give a verbal response right away i often said you want me to put that followed up with an email just because then you have a record of what is that they get a call you know in the middle of meeting right does this take a two thirds vote but the whenever there is time it's pretty much almost as fast for us to put things in and into an e mail  obviously things that are more complicated and require some research or you know some strategy and we're going to put those into a formal memo obviously those take longer and they and we would  present those in a you know written memo but even written memos mostly get delivered to climbs these days by being attached to an e mail right you know so that's our principal way of communicating they are good  do you give binding single quotes for work on specific projects if so please give some examples if most projects it's pretty difficult to know ahead of time what you're going to run into when you investigate as as well as a  as a client believes that they are telling you everything that you need to know we think oftentimes it turns out that there is some additional piece of information that answer your question in two hours or ten hours or twenty hours or whatever and certainly with respect to litigation it would not be reasonable to do that so that isn't to say that we wouldn't want to be  to communicate how difficult something is and how much work is involved so that so that we can make judgments along the way but and it wouldn't for example be uncommon for me to  but to say that we're going to guarantee that and that there are no hidden legal issues here that are going to prove to be a stumbling block or no facts that that are going to be u ncovered i think that's doing everybody a disservice and you don't certainly don't want to be and we certainly don't want to be in a position where we can't we feel that we than then actually ever get foreclosed on so i think the long term impact of of that was minimal but you so see it was reminded how many days are in september a number of times after that we think it's very important for towns to understand what their identity is and and we strongly believe that each town should be able to pursue its own agenda i mentioned before about the about the power plants at the time we were representing four different towns with respect to four different power plants and in some cases we were actively courting the power plants and other cases as in fact then we were fighting them and someone asked me how can you possibly before a power plant in one town i'm against a power plant in another town and the answer is each community needs to decide for itself do i want this or do i not want this and they ought to be able to implement it and  so our view is that we were coming here to a town that that has had to make some important decisions about what its future identity is going to be and  stockbridge where i was told on my first day on the job that the principle duty of town council is to freeze time and we don't basically want any kind of development there it's not a normal rockwell's paintings we don't want it and so each town has its own sense of what it wants and that and we think it's a good match to be able to assist you in implementing your own vision take a five minute break we have three interviews thank you and this is here with me for a second for the people at home where halfway through the interviews we've we've interviewed three firms of get three remaining so we just came back from a break welcome  in providing a proposal to offer town county town council services to our town of foxborough we have received your application packet and have had time to review it prior to this meeting tonight we are interviewing six firms and we have allocated one half hour to each firm time will be structured so we can allow ample time for your firm as well as the other candidates a standard format will be as follows you'll be given ten minutes for an opening opening introduction to describe qualifications and perhaps the reasons that your firm is best suited for foxborough as needs as our town council following following your introduction there will be a fifteen minute question and answer session each of our five members will ask you one question we will not fought we will not ask follow up questions and we will use this time to listen following the q and a session you will be given five minutes at the end to offer a closing statement following tonight's interview board will conven before we leave tonight in decide which firm of firms to invite back for a second interview where we can discuss the possibility of an agreement in more detail this is a public meeting however public participation will not be allowed foxborough cable access t v is broadcasting this interview live for our residence at home so if you could please begin to the microphone and hear this to self they're pretty good so if you want to just kind of lean towards them again thank you for your time and so with that introduction please proceed thank you thanks very much my name is jim to me i'm part of what murphy has seat to me in one hand i have with me brandon brandon morris who's been practicing municipal water for eight of the nine years that he's been practicing and mike mckerrow who goes primarily labor personnel employment type matters and he's been doing that for for eight years tell you a little bit about our firm where thirty two lawyers half of our practices in the private sector and the remainder is in public sector work which in compas is representing schools we do a large amount of special education in schools and then the work as town council we represent approximately ten communities doing town council work our approach in the way we do this with our communities is to come in as a team in this case depending and i understand the power of p included labor and personnel but i know we have separate labor council at this point so i'm not sure exactly how that will work but our approach generally on just that strictly town council work is that would come in as a team i'd be the lead person brandon would also be participating the idea of that is you're going to have the same people it's not a revolving door i mean there may be an occasion where there's some issue with someone in the offices handled and has a little more familiarity with a special particular thing but as a general rule we come in as it is a team you see the same people we think that very important in terms of the consistency stability the service you get and it isn't a revolving door of a different lawyer every week coming in and in that way we know w high premium on quality of our work we have both good lawyers we take pride in doing good lawyer in addition to that we have a lot of experience you'll see that the like the time we've represented some of the clients that we've listed in our response to the ira a we have in addition to the grounding in a solid grounding law what we think is we can bring judgement to be here and experience which really rounds out the picture in terms of giving you good advice and being able to give you an idea where things will end up then and pitfalls and so forth  before we meet on a monthly basis all of the men just below is to go over issues to make sure that if there are new issues coming up if there are issues that are particularly complex that someone's handling we collaborate  that allows us to be on the cutting edge and know what's going on in the municipal water area so we can kind of anticipate and head things things off it also allows us to be very efficient and class defective in terms of dealing with things we're not going to the books to look at something for the first time we've got a good handle on what's going on and we've developed a good sense of what issues are and how issues should be handled so we can handle them without reinventing the wheel every time and to be very efficient and cost effective and i think the last thing i'd like to read emphasize is our commitment that we don't pick up every advertisement for a town council job and just willy nilly apply for something we look at in terms of it is a town that we think would match up with a town that would would be a good relationship with us we were very represented many of which we've represented for over twenty years all of which we've represented over fifteen years we take a lot of pride in that and that's because we think we've provided good service we've injected the confidence of the people in that in those towns  and we've had a commitment to those towns and we think we have a formula that works it's productive and efficient in terms of one of the other things i think that we bring to bear is a strong appreciation for what it is to be in the public sector and to represent a public public boards we recognise that you are the elected officials you're responsible for setting the policy that's into something that we thought was down the wrong path would point that out but it's not a call to say don't do that and so we think we bring our unique ability to work with boards to keep them informed we do training we have included in our of the a number of the kinds of things that we issue one watch ange is there's been a development in the open meeting law or the ethics laws are there anything else like that so we think we can provide a full service we think we can do it very effectively we are willing to make this commitment and we hope you see that that is a commitment to the town in terms of the representation we provide and the relationship would like to develop at the time so hopefully i give you an overview of council for municipality where the subjects of the litigation the outcomes and your firm's contribution to the outcomes well is there's a couple i can think of one was a couple years ago we had a case in hanover where there was a big protest in the attorney general's office of the old against the town the big protests the difference in the bits was close to a million dollars we looked at the case very carefully really worked on it all right and we felt that the attorney general was was taking a wrong view of the war on the issue we went to spirit court the spirit court judge disagreed with us we felt strongly that we were giving good advice ultimately the case was picked up was overturned in the appeals court was taken up to the state supreme court unfortunately that the client had the confidence to stay with the advice we were providing and the end result was not only that they prevailed in terms of the decisions they made in the bid process but also that was firmly established that certain judgments three years ago which is in federal court was in federal court where they were attempting to build a cell tower and i see with the foster open space plan a lot of communities are very cognizant of protecting views in a statics and in this case milton borders the blue hills and they were attempting to put one hundred forty foot cell phone tower for five carriers right next to the blue hills on an off ramp by exit three case went as far as summary judgment and with the c very difficult to win because it's federal preemption the federal laws are that cell service should be everywhere and the shouldn't be any barriers on in that case we actually were dealing i was dealing with two boards those dealing with the zoning board and  conservation commission which both on their own respective bylaws and state protection act said now which as far as i can tell is the only case involving two boards it's particularly a conservation commission the  federal court proximately about a year ago actually issued a decision upholding the decision for conservation commission for the board of appeals and basically stopped at that point the construction were on appeal right now at the first circuit the federal appeals court was argued in december but it's actually got some some good issues good issues in terms of trying to limit the construction of cell towers complexity of the project's local impacts and then describe the outcome well we represent natick and all of the development that's going on in the in the natick area with my partner john flynn was involved in the latest iteration of that which entails you know the whole permit in process access some terms of roadways making sure that there's appropriate mitigation for the communities in terms iterations in terms of of development we have danvers i haven't been as volved as much in danvers but they routinely have those issues up on liberty tree mall so it's something we're very s theater a number of restaurants a whole foods type of store c v s on the other side of town we had the derby shops which is a major very successful development so we've worked through all of those issues both from a permeating stage and advising the boards on the permeating and then also from the bigger issues of these good for the town is the kind of development down once you're going to return tax revenue are you going to be able to limit the impacts will receive a geisha so we've covered those issues on a number of fronts and that's something that happens with the communities we've had we've been able to handle it's very good thank you it's between two well i think that's where developing that relationship becomes important i mean there are times when you recognize as an issue it's important people want to have in black and white in a formal kind of way all of the elements of what the facts were you looked at what the legal issues were pros the cons the outcome there are other times when you just really need some guidance in terms of can we do it this way or can we do it that way and we do it both ways so that's something i think that we learn to develop with the towns because every time you need a little advice you don't necessarily want i mean it takes time and therefore money to develop those formal opinions whereas many times you don't need them other times you do so that's where we develop a working relationship and we we try to get a sense of the tone we would always ask i mean you know first of all we we do what we're asked to do a night we don't make those decisions but i think as you go along and you develop that working relationship you can say jesus must be something what in writing is is this something that you an e mail suffices or a phone call and we can do any of those betting on what's appropriate what's what board wants a good thank you for some areas of the law i mean are also more susceptible to having that roadmap  approach a couple weeks ago i worked on something for a planning board they were going to have an applicant come in and there was a question about frontage and whether or not or a lot was develop a ball because it had enough or didn't have enough frontage and so i gave him an a roadmap of this is what needs to be done to have it as a preexisting non conforming law or otherwise to get to get around that and actually two days ago i got a fax and yesterday got a fax from the attorney for the applicant which follow that road  more often than not we feel we end up putting more effort into it than what we get paid for i just finished a project where i agreed to do something on him and with me standing by  i meant but you know it turns out that the things get more complicated as you go along and they first seem it just frankly as it worked and now there are occasions when it works to our advantage and not to the clients but we found the an hourly rate we feel we're a fish and if something takes longer than it should sometimes we'll adjust the our billing accordingly we're always open to discussing you know how long something we has estimated will take if it's taking longer and they waste you know to do it better or without as much time but in general the fixed fees is something we would not have found to work out well up and even put there was an email exchange i'm well up two months later she picks up the beacon and looks at a report of a case from the attorney general's anyhow she said this is what it says you told me we could we could do this the decision i think was down and carver said you can't do that so as a result i'm trying to think like i think maybe this might hit home closer to home and i was i think maybe there was a school committee involved in this too but in any event i said gee i read the case right away so you know you're right we've got to straighten this right out so you know it was not like i had read the decision at the time and it was only it was the a g s decision was like a week or ten days of the time i gave it but i hadn't caught it  generally we have some of the firm looking at that they hadn't caught it i said but this you know where we're on the wrong side of this is what i suggest we do is post a meeting announce what happened revote it get it done right away the local open meeting complaint with the attorney general's office we've responded and been forthright about how we got to where we were the local paper hasn't yet decided whether they're going to pursue the the issue but  i mean that's what you have to do you know and that's that that will happen and that's something i'd like to have happen but you've got to deal with it and deal that's that's approach hopefully we've been able to answer some of the questions i think we do bring a breath of experience represented a number of different kinds of communities which is exposed to us and given us a lot of experience we do feel we can establish the kind of relationship that we pride brightest selves on in terms of working with the town and provide good services quality that's something we really put a lot of emphasis on we were professionals at this it's something we've chosen to do as a firm we want to be known as is doing a good job at it we think we've succeeded in that we encourage you to talk to some of the other towns that we y're holding their second round of public input the first one was let's wrap our arms around the whole town and see what the desire is for the whole time housing business traffic economics they took got that input and then this thursday they haven't run two which is what you want to see around the common around the center of the businesses so that's thursday the following thursday that's we're going to have a joint meeting with the planning board that's talking specifically on housing and forty b s in the state process for wrapping them around our arms around that so we're just waiting for one he's coming back so we're spinning our wheels a little bit thank you ok so we know who one of the competitors was prepared a just a brief one minute introduction just to get you on the same page without going else so if you bear with me i'll just read this and then let you introduce yourselves on behalf of foxborough board selectman i want to say thank you for your interest in and effort in providing a proposal to offer town council services to our town foxborough we have received your application package and have had time pride is meeting to review it tonight we are interviewing six firms and we have allocated one half  time will be structured in mark so timekeeper so you can allow ample time for your firm as well as the other firms are standard format will be as follows you'll be given ten minutes for an opening introduction to describe the firm's qualifications and perhaps the reasons that your firm is best suited for fox bros needs as a town council following your time an introduction there will be a fifteen minute question and answer session each of our five members will ask one question we will not ask a follow up question and we will use the the time just to listen following the question and answer session you'll be given a closing five minutes to end and to offer a closing statement following tonight's interview a board will convene before we leave tonight and decide which firm or firms to invite back for a second follow up interview where we can discuss the possibility of an agreement in more detail this is a public meeting however public participation will not be allowed tonight should the public at home have comments from this interview process time will be provided at our next meeting under citizen's input foxborough cable access t v is broadcasting this interview live for residence at home so if you could just speak into the microphones and if pretty decent microphones are just going towards in the partner rich and i we have five partners and three associates two other partners who had hoped to perhaps introduce themselves to you tonight mark the browser who does a lot of land use and zoning work and one of our other partners lisa meade who along with rich and i helped manage towns from the primary contact phase on down also works and in general municipal we have five total partners three associates we have kind of a partner heavy approach we have one main office in concord and then each of the other partners has as separate office but we have two partners in concord marc and his wife betty anne who does real estate work for us  lisa meet is in newburyport where she lives and where she has a robust practice up there she's also a former three term mayor up there rich lives in scituate where he's the moderator and on probably have dozen other boards all over time and he has his office there i live in next door norfolk and i have an officer over in millis and so in this way we're we were able to i think live in my car yes you know where a town council in eleven towns right now and we've been doing the town council work since about two thousand and seven or so and we've been special counsel where we cut our teeth for a long time probably right now ago and we've kind of got together on the premise of doing the town council work slightly different and i think you can see that some of that in our proposal we through both our billing practice and just the way we approach it we kind of take a slightly different look at it we kind of take a proactive approach and that's why i think our flat fee proposals work so well we'd like to work with you get as close to that policy line as is appropriate for a lawyer to do with t crossing it and help you achieve your goals and help work with you and identify problems before they become problems in litigation which in our opinion in our experience becomes more expensive and less productive so we focus our efforts on on training on being there at board meetings on helping right decisions on giving seminars providing office hours and being proactive when we do it when we represent talent and about half of our town council towns we represent on a flat fee basis we are there is often as you like and as many phone calls as you like so the so that you're never worried about picking up the phone because how close you are  higher hybrid and in all those towns it's been enormously successful we hope you take the time to call some of the town administrators in those towns and ask exactly what their experience has been with it we think it's a winner there are months when litigation crops up where the berry toss but it tends to balance out over time and because we have so many towns now it balances out from town to town obviously litigation is the single biggest drain but with our approach  proactive approach whether you use a flat fee approach or not we have seen the litigation list go down when i took over kingston from my former firm in two thousand and eight we had a laundry list of litigation now we have next to nothing which is came over and state is town council and wareham we have whittled down the litigation list to nothing and that's been our experience throughout our towns now that sometimes means that we're on site more i love it where ever the best part of the job everyone in our firm has been a town official like i said leases been it was a three term mayor mark is still on his planning board in concord riches still the moderator i sit on the council on aging by law review committee i've been on the c p c i still do work throughout my town on various things so we all do a little bit and pieces of it we understand that we are we hear your pain we feel your pain so we feel we can identify with the problems you have in the balance has been for us because we like to get involved is making sure that it's your policies not our policies we all know what we'd like to do in our towns but the what we've been able to forge over the last few years is to try and understand what you want we meet the board we discuss things with you we hold office hours whatever you whatever you guys want to do i mean i'm in the next town over i i sense a little bit of some of the things that are going on here more than sense i can read about a lot of it and these are important issues and we feel that we would probably be most interesting getting up to speed on those first looking at your list litigation trying to cull through it get to know your land use boards and your other boards your town manager and try and work through some of the issues that we can be helped to avoid problems in the future get ahead of problems so i've rambled on a little bit which has something to add which has a whole different a lot of us come from a land use context which has a tremendous meeting works and it's ins and outs and the high points and the low points you know as jay said you know he and i had worked together at another firm which we won't name in a much more satisfying way the toughest thing for me about the way law is traditionally practiced in the town council field is that your lawyer almost becomes your enemy when the lawyer walks in with the war the first thing you do is you look at your watch and you get worried about how long your lawyer is going to be there and sometimes that worry overcomes the real need for having the lawyer there i don't think that worry serves you well and just speaking personally i never found a very satisfying i don't like to meet with a client and to always have that you know below the surface feeling that somehow i'm the enemy because in the background in your mind you're hearing tick tick tick and i think that's the beauty of what jay and my colleagues have developed in terms of his flat feet when we come we're not the enemy we're there to help and as someone who has walked a mile in your shoes i'm happy to say that i along with jay and the other members can bring that kind of experience to you and when you need us where they're now i love doing office hours because i want to be part of the teen i want to know what you think i want to be able to help you accomplish what it is you want to accomplish and if i'm just a regular guy that you can talk to about things and bounce ideas off of in a context where you don't have to worry about how much it's costing you to do that i think that's to your benefit  i just you know truly the best thing about what we're doing at the office hours i mean i just think it's fantastic and we structure than a whole bunch of different ways and different boards of selectmen and different administrators or managers want us once a month or as needed we do it differently in the different towns it's been really helpful especially on the land use front sometimes of the d p w guy can't get away he needs to work on a project needs me to look at a contract this and that is it it  has been really helpful it's not for everyone but for the most of our towns we do it you can bang out a lot truck boy right there and meet with the planners i do site visits on my office hours i've a becomes a civil rights complaint and that's just ere the subject has the litigation the outcomes in your firm's contribution to the outcome oh boy we both have big lengthy lists for me i'm just going to reel off the most recent one that i think was significant and is actually not even in my my usual practice area i do a tremendous amount of forty b work forty a work and wetlands work and i have some you know occasionally when you get a nice forty b when that's great and i've had those but the most significant one is one of more recent vintage that i had and i actually at the appellate tax board which is not a place i have always practice where the town of scituate actually reaches home town hired me to work on a tax dispute involving a closed church the archdiocese closed the church and there was an active vigil in the church so they hadn't sold it but they did want to sell it when they church when they closed it the the town started taxing it they weren't using it as a church anymore and the church fought that and they fought it for years and the town it's a three million dollar waterfront property so we're not talking about something in the hidden away anywhere so it was a significant amount of tax dollars and they pushed and they pushed and they gave me my marching orders to stay on it and it was new law and it was followed essentially throughout the you know to the extent that people follow such small issues throughout the united states because churches are exempt everywhere and we were able to centrally create a line of arguments that is now being used to help municipalities that are similarly situated in massachusetts as well as elsewhere it was a pretty pretty significant case i think that i got well i'm happy to say that in the last year and a half i've been more in the position of heading off with a geisha rather than litigating the heck out of things which i think is probably the way you want to be but that being said i did have kind of an interesting case about a year ago called versus sprint spectrum an appeals court case and in that case sprint had transferred all of its assets to a captive delaware corporation for one dollar and th controversy about six hundred thousand dollars if i won the case so using the sham corporate doctrine i was able to convince the appeals court that this was a bogus transfer that this was a captive corporation and i'm happy to say that got six hundred thousand dollars and we'll continue to get sizable property payment for this property so i've had a number of construction cases as you probably know with construction cases on building projects those are usually won in the preliminary rounds where you have an unsuccessful better they go for an injunction if you lose at the injun level the project grinds to a halt and you're usually in a rebid situation and i'm happy to say that so far they've managed to prevail in all of these injunctive relief cases and we've got school building projects going up in lots of great things that are rich which can mention he's done a lot of adult entertainment cases that i don't like we both have gathered there less for television i suppose but i've never actually been able in doing these kids i once had a judge who said oh the supreme court and search harare was denied and we were able to prevent a strip club from those are difficult cases to we've both had to deal with that it's a combination of zoning and civil rights that some of our biggest challenges yeah the strip club people tried to hire me for the next case and i said no thank you on that no question numbers no no vision so regarding commercial development describe the breadth of your firm's role in a major commercial development on behalf of the municipality in specific examples describing the complexity of the projects local impacts and then describe the outcome sure we that i'm quite confident to say that dollar for dollar pound for pound we stack up against anybody my partner mark is the development guy he literally wrote the book that is on your bookshelf here and you're planning offices on zoning and land use and planning law he is he did  legacy place project all the permits massive development agreements which came contain massive mitigation agreements for the town that brought moneys and then had had so many assurances i did all of it very well i did all the permits for what will be a humongous ten fold expansion of mashpee commons when it when it arrives which includes not only hundreds and hundreds of thousands of square feet of new commercial but also four hundred eighty units of housing creating a new town center work with designers throughout and it's a fifteen percent of that housing is going to be affordable housing it was a mix of six or seven different massachusetts if it goes forward and we had to litigate that in three different forms all the way up to the s j c we won each and every piece of that and that that away to a certain amount of permanent we have permeated more wind turbines i believe my partner lisa meade has become essentially the go to specialist for permanent of wind turbines and solar facilities throughout massachusetts drive down route three through kings we has been able to negotiate the type of agreements that get direct streams of monies to towns where as in a lot of these the money flows more of the private provider of of  wind boy goes on and on we have a list and in our in our materials we have worked on more than three quarters of all chapter forty b projects in the state between mark and myself i don't think there's anyone who's litigated more of permits for or done develop agreements more i'm working on a development agreement for ws right now in the town of bellingham where i'm town council that will create a new  goes on and on and on mark is working constantly he did the big project up and have rolled to turn all that old vacant mill space in a viable affordable and market rate housing complete renovations i did a similar project in watertown th took unused blighted space cleaned it up and got it done as a mix of housing and urban infill that provided retail and shops so i don't think anyone's done much more than than we've done  i know i'm missing some that are in our list but and we're doing that every day is special counsel for not doing his town council i usually do the tough stuff  writing when you think a verbal response should suffice and please state your opinion as to the difference between the two well it's interesting you say in all the lead which decide to so much it's really so changed in terms of giving advice and providing opinions when we started giving opinions to council at to town to town council it was always in writing it was on the letterhead it was in such and such a form email as change that drastically sometimes it depends upon what the town want and what the what they need a love for example i work very closely with the town administrator is in east and bellingham i'm talking to them every day and i'll get a quickie from them tell me how many how many how do i change the zoning by law and that's an email when there's an issue that affects liability and i think rachel probably follows the same thing i'll say this seems like one you want in writing if you want this in writing sometimes there's a good reason not to have something in writing as well that it's going to be really bad you might hear it say you know what but not so much bad from the standpoint of bad news but bad from the standpoint that if we have to give an opinion that could necessarily become a public record we want to make sure they were going down a road so we'll try and work through a verbal first and then say this is a weighty matter is this something you'd like in a formal opinion or not but we generally look to the talent and it's all stripes all shapes and sizes as to as to what people want but i think the weightier the issue the more i would lean towards a written day to day i'm issuing fifteen twenty little bits and pieces of of legal advice those are e mail those are on the phone and occasional text here and there of that's the way they communicate with me it's the bigger stuff where we go and then there's the office hours to where we're sitting down with someone and working it out just like we are right now comes down to what you know what policy do you have in place some some boards are very structured you know all contact with council must go through the chairman ok and in other towns it's you know free for all it's up to you to tell us what you want and we'll go over the mark next well sure in fact i've done that for a few towns now if you have it looking at our fee and expense thing we give two flat fee proposals the first is all and that's your advice that's attending meetings that's office hours and that to most forms of litigation i have been doing this flat fee stuff now for five years and i've had one excluded case from it so it's almost all gone through the flat fee so there's been no need to have a binding cost but other towns that are cash strapped where i'd for example i serve a special council so i was doing a something for the town of brookline a forty b case and we took it up to a certain point and they were stressed with their legal budget they wanted to take it another step they were concerned about taking it to this certain level of appeal what would that look like for them and i said i tell you what i know i've done enough of these types of cases so i can measure it i'm going to do and i developed a fee with them we talked about it where they're at certain milestones there was a certain payment predetermine coming in and i have to bear some of the risk in case there's a curveball from opposing counsel but we do enough of it so that we have a good feel for sometimes for the towns where we don't have a flat fee or where we have the partial flat fee which is our proposal number two we will box litigation off or specific projects often then there's my partner  rewrite your zoning for you we read as part of our flat fees we do rezoning bylaws routinely in your annual spring or your special fall town meetings or whatever that that's part of the fee but sometimes you want to get chuck it all out the window and start anew that's one of mark's primary specialties he does that with a boxed face where he's done it he'll look around your town hall see what the needs are look at your current zoning code will talk to the planner and he'll develop a fee so we've been successful doing that i think the flat fee is the way we've gone more so along those same lines of kind of capitalizing on certainty but we've worked out fees and all different kinds of context from trials i've done it for trials i've done it for specific forty a three level or three tier proposal the first proposal is sixty five hundred dollars a month that is you get everything that's the cadillac the things that we don't do we don't do labor laws you know and generally tax title work monday and tax title work we don't do either that's normally handled through a separate fund everything else is done and we will come to your meetings now it says three meetings a month with your board some months that's four meetings some months it's two i never never oh charge someone for that fourth meeting i don't intend to start it handles attendance and preparation for your town meetings it handles writing decisions helping you craft bylaws all of the opinions across the board all of the select means licensing hearings if necessary all the office hours and all the land use litigation that you can eat so to speak all of that it excludes non insurable things that kind of run outside general by law enforcement again i've seen it happen once in five years and all of our towns where something fell outside of insurance and outside of our flat face so that's the first one at sixty five hundred all access all the time pick up the phone whenever you want to the second tier is a five thousand dollar animal that's five thousand a month that's everything but litigation so that's full access board attendance board drafting everything we just talked about with the exception of litigation that you pay on it and it worked out well for them so there are some towns to do that the reason if you have a low litigation count great but one piece of superior court litigation even on a monday can be twenty five grand and that's a that's a big chunk out of your annual legal budget the third tier is just a straight hourly similar to what you've seen elsewhere we still try to be as proactive as possible under that s but it is a straight hourly and sometimes just want to keep doing it that way you can get before more minutes and one more question and then there are your closing bell and please tell us if i'm mistake i don't think in terms of kind of recent experience the we haven't i can't recall a mistake we've had a piece of litigation i have i have given perhaps incorrect advice on say a zoning matter to a board or in drafting a decision and i just cop to it and say let's let's move forward from here there's only i'm pleased to say that we're it's few and far between and we've never had to have anyone resort to our malpractise carrier and we've never done anything in terms of a state that's resulted in litigation or anything else like that or irreversible damage comes along lines and sometimes we give an opinion on something and then another attorney will say but you missed this  me there's only one way to do it and that's that's to say i don't know what riches experiences are all thrown out i was doing a tom meeting a couple of years ago and there was a proposal amendment that would have changed the zoning by law and a question came up as to whether a current applicant would be grandfathered not if the by law was changed and so i asked the planner you know when the hearing dates were and how far along things were and the planner gave me some information that seemed a little quizzical to me but the gist of it was that the person was far enough along that this party would been grandfathered originally and then interrupt you and then he gave you the option of finishing this thought or doing a closing because i'm trying to keep everybody on the same thirty minutes i'll finish quick because it ended happily i checked with so it didn't sit right with me i researched the information over the weekend between meeting at the next session of town meeting i as moderator for the mike i ask somebody to reconsider the article that i learned this information that if people had voted in a particular way based on my opinion on the night before they should revote it a cop to it and people said thank you very much and they voted the same way that they did on the first night but you know if you see a one thing i wanted to say about the way we've also structured this one is slightly unique rich has a preexisting relationship doing work for the town so i thought it would be good for him to be kind of labeled as the primary contact person i've a very local presen that we both manage a few different towns so we're kind of proposing kind of almost a dual so where you would have access to either of us we actually do that in some of our other towns so we're not that either of us have the time to do it but there are times when i'm just closer it's just easier and i also do with more land use and rich to probably does a little bit more town meeting in a little bit more finance so we really are kind of presenting it as a double primary now every administrator and every board of selectmen wants to structure it differently and we're receptive but we think it's a kind of unique way given my proximity literally took me seven minutes to get here just took me forty yeah ok if you want somebody who's going to get down in the trenches with you and i don't know what you want to what sort of counseling for if you're looking for somebody once you get down the trenches with you health care your burden and who's going to be there with you and who probably burn a hole in his stomach along with the hole you're burning in your stomach where welcome richard and mike thank you because if they're with us for a second i'm going to read a quick one page introduction introduction that kind of get you on the same page is everybody else the same thing that we read  to all the six out of the six candidates and just so people know the reason that you're six is not because of any other reason that you have a package came in six the first package came in first so that's that's how we did it  i want to say thank you for your interest and effort in providing a proposal to offer town council services to our town of foxborough we have received your application packet and have had to time it had had the time to review it before this meeting tonight we are interviewing six firms and we have allocated a half hour each to each firm time will be structured so we can allow ample time for your firm as well as the other candidates my standard format is as follows you will be given ten minutes for an opening introduction to describe your firm's qualification and perhaps the reason that your firm is best suited for foxborough needs as town council following your introduction the ten minute introduction will be a fifteen minute question in answer session each of our five members will ask you one question in there will not be a follow up question we will use the time to listen following the question and answer session you'll be given five minutes at the end to offer a closing statement which brings us up to the thirty minutes following tonight's interview board will convene before we leave tonight in the side which firm affirms to invite back for the second follow up interview where we can discuss the possibility of an agreement in more detail this is a public meeting however public participation will not be allowed to the public have comments from this interview process time will be provided at the next citizens input next week foxborough cable access t v is broadcasting this live for the residence at home so if you speak if you can speak to want to talk about briefly to bring you up to date on my experience other than having served as counsel for foxboro for thirty years i've also been tom consul and sharon for twenty four years continuously up to the present time i've served as special town council in five communities over the years  mansfield around some of those because of that extensive municipal experience i've also represented private companies individuals in governmental la permuting development issues like that in the past i've served as a chairman of the public law section of the mass bar association chairman of the municipal law committee mass by association  four attorneys mike will tell you about his own experience but the two full time associates that we have are lisa whalen and some of you have worked with lisa she has  sixteen years of practice she started out on two and a half years of the land court which does a lot of governmental work as you know that link course the zoning and planning location for many cases after that she spent two years with a boston law firm in municipal law and she has been with with me for twelve years including for five years when she was living in the government the law mike what you just told your experience and will go back to what i'll offer and short after are also working at the land court in clerking for the judges of the probate court i went on to  municipal law firm for two years as well where my main practice not only general municipal law but focusing on land use and real estate litigation representing zoning boards planning boards conservation commissions working with well actor two years at that municipal law firm went to open my own practice focused on real estate land use as well working with private parties before local boards and working with commercial real estate developers after up as well my practice remained close the same but taking on more municipal law work as well teaming to work with private developer developers on commercial projects but focusing mainly on the land use litigation still and the real estate aspects so we are you know essentially a very experienced municipal law firm but that maybe some of you don't know this but that is not all that i've done in my career i have represented in do represent a number of corporations in the twenty to forty million dollar business range i think that experience is useful to me as a municipal attorney because you get a good sense of what people are looking for when they're dealing with government because of the representing municipalities i've done a lot of work  for person person seeking zoning permits development the development of authority i'm currently serving as a court appointed trustee in walpole for ninety acres or apostle of land and was engaged by the court for that position principle ie because of my experience in government the law and we're in the process of trying to sell that i would suggest submit to you that all the firms that you're interviewing tonight can technically do the jobs as none of us that don't know the law are all of great experience and that what i suggest sets us apart if i can say so it's me and it it's it's how one approaches a position we're not a large law firm and we are completely accessible i think those of  with it with me know that it's accessibility can you reach us do we respond to you you will be as you always were a very important client to our law firm where h response of you'll have home phones you have our cell phones you'll have our emails were all burdened with the blackberries and so we respond it's no good to have a smile or unless you can actually call and we get some answers and the way i would see the firm representing you is that i would be tom consul everything that was happening i participate in know about and supervise i personally don't do the research myself i supervise it i know everything that's in sharon for example what's going on i've known everything when i was on consul here it's going on but you will work with ah law for him as well other thing that i bring to the table isn't this stork knowledge of this community i mean i don't think anybody knows more about what's going on in foxborough over the last thirty thirty five years than i do  know the players i know the people i know the interests i think i've developed a relatively good reputation during that during that time so it's expensive accessibility it's experience it's respons the cost and the cost control measures we're well aware of what's going on in municipal finance the building right that i proposed as embarrassingly low frankly and it's much lower than i charge five a clients coming across a desk that we know will be expensive for you we talk about it we'll let you know before here and so that you don't get surprised at the end litigation is sometimes necessary i think those people who know me know that i'm not it not that i dislike it it's just most of the time simply not in your interest to litigate it's very time consuming it's very expensive it's sadly unpredictable given the nature of our courts so we we like to not do that sometimes you have to and in the years that i was talking counsel sometimes i did with i think some success but you know that's that's something it's it's good to try to avoid i don't i don't like when boards within a community have disputes with one another and that's something we should all try very hard to keep from happening and control that it isn't that difficult to do when everybody has as good will and openness for one another and so that that's something i try to avoid we the way we we bill we will intense comments of tenths of an hour read the law you know what the law is and you tell the client but the good lawyers are also counsel they're constantly here you're looking for their judgment you're looking for their temperament you're looking for their veracity integrity and you know i'd like to think that we bring a lot of that to the table the relationship is as high as fiduciary relationship that people in the business community can have we owe all our clients all of them great faith utmost honesty integrity openness and that's what we offer to wanted to sell beer throughout the entire game i think as you know there's a cutoff now i think it's fifteen minutes after the start of the first half we litigated that issue before the beer at the time we dead and we were successful in winning that remember it was any mccormack who was the former attorney general was on the other side and walking into the courtroom and everybody was saying hi eddie how you doing it seemed like in a way so we litigated that we have in the past when there are also litigated licensing issues for the time we had superior court litigation also successful on that everybody remembers the michael jackson yeah litigation and we won i don't know what you call that a success but that was pretty significant at the time ok thank you jeannie second question regarding commercial development describe the breath of your firm's role in a major commercial development on behalf of the meanest palate give specific examples describing the complexity of the project's local impacts and then describe the outcome while i had the great good fortune to work for many years with the selectmen michael cupola and my involvement in the stadium project i'm talking about the existing same project was i mean i was at the table for three four years and that included presentations to the legislature over a year year and i have to wing with the selectmen dealing with the water and sewer commission that was responsible for the purple pipe system the recycle system negotiating the lease representing the housing development authority in foxborough for a seventy million dollars bond issue and with some luck we got the stadium that was a obviously  commercial development then sharon i represented the tom on a six hundred unit three hundred sixty acre fifty or sixty million dollar development property and what was going to be an agricultural development on the other but that's a very lived multi million dollar development i represented the city of  we won't we won that case on summary judgment which is an accomplishment and something but those are the major development projects i've been involved in thanks for governments have done a lot in the private sector you how are you learning to see and think when the board of selectmen asks you for a legal response please explain when you think the requested advice should be in writing when do you think a verbal response should suffice are times frankly though when a board will want to know an answer and not necessarily have that opinion published and so when when i know the superintend schools years ago it's great i try i always had the good sense to call me up and say what do you think about this and i tell him and he said don't bother give me or don't bother giving me or an opinion such so it's a judgment call or but almost without exception we do provide our opinions in writing to the boy do you thank you i'd do you give binding single single fee quotes for work on specific projects if so please give some examples generally not in the governmental contacts billing for almost everything is on an hourly basis i've i've found over the years that that's just ferret to the client and fair to my firm i'm open to it but it's the problem with that is it's so hard to predict where any matter is going to take you that somebody will be disserved will be disservice to either the client will get the service but but we could and you could wind up being overcharged though i doubt that that would happen so i generally don't do that i get what's going my private clients i almost never do flat fee were just too unpredictable even in the areas of law that you know really well i do a lot of franchise law and and so i review franchise agreements fairly well i don't think having the kind of mistake in legal opinion you mean yeah clear and you come down on one side of the other and i don't i don't think i recall a case where i give an opinion and then it was clearly wrong but you know if if my advice and my opinion on something is not correct then i find out about it and i'm sure it's happened i just have a recall that i guess you compare me those things you know what the client know right away i was wrong and you tell them right up front ok thank you those are the questions so if you want to entertain five minutes of a closing thoughts well thank you very much it's really it's a great pleasure for me to be back here i just i guess i'll just repeat some of the things i said where you hire is going to give you the right technical advice we all know one another all the firms and that's read the same books in the same cases with us and because of our size you know you'll always be able to reach us by cell phone we're accessible where response of our we're located fifteen minutes from here last time i applied for this job i was two minutes from so it's that we know about we understand cos we understand municipal law a lot and by that i mean you have to understand the politics of it and by that i mean you have to know who you dealing with you have to understand the ramifications of your advice you have to know how to talk to government officials and i have tremendous respect in this as you know take the job or not but i have great respect for all of you and for your willingness to serve and what has obviously been to many of you a very very difficult time very different and i appreciate that and i have great respect for people who are who do that john adams was a selector so you're in great company and it sounds corny but i'm very honored to be here i hope we get the job if we don't i really wish the time is also to keep going so keep going with what you've done with that yes we did the six interviews yet my thought process coming in and that's why i put this kind of matrix at the at the end of it we would rate of the six firms one through six and if we get consensus we look at these and everyone comes up with the same firm as number one it kind of gives us the answer if it's close maybe you want to interview the first two or maybe the first three  those are my thoughts and i haven't shared them other than information in the packets for you guys but  well i was thinking that where we've had the packets for a while now we've had the interview is fresh in our mind and we at least we can rate on and then see were false we don't have to make a decision tonight maybe you know if we did discuss you guys feel comfortable making a decision as you know the agreement that we have now with the current council it's going month to month so there's no dire straits to get this done tonight or next week i mean it's been it's been lingering for a while so i think where it's fresh everyone is that a tremendous effort to put stuff in i think we owe it to tackle it and get it done as soon as we can but it's already been three hours if you guys are tired and want a fresh aloft go back and revisit it and then come back  over the next week and get next tuesday and then back to you would you want that on as i'm just trying to think of the largest tax you certainly certainly if we're not sharing the information you can e mail it back to me linda and i went to a meeting last night with a water and sewer i haven't shared this with you guys yet but i just put it on the docket for next tuesday to discuss the patriots went to the water and sewer and i want to come in front of the selectmen to give their thoughts and ideas i'm moving forward with the billboards trying to sort out that whole mess and kind of give us insight on to what they're thinking and hopefully we're past phase one of a mass and we can take the time to work together to move forward so i thought that was important enough to put on next week's agenda for half an hour yeah so those two the big ticket things we still got to deal with the fire con not the fire contract the over time which i don't want that to get lost so i wanted to put you know kind of turn the screws a little bit to get the fire chief kevin pecos and randy to do those items of reevaluation so we can make a decision because we still got to do the police overtime and i just this is dragging into the summer so i think those three of the the big issues that are on the agenda and there's probably three or four little ones we have the meeting with the plan that's the next tuesday mean time if we're close because we might not be close just yet might be a done deal of late ok we're going to bring back so why don't you if you would everyone email me their one through six in this is a little if it's not clear each person gets a number one through six so there's not number one and then to number twos it sounds silly but it is it's you could do it either way e mail it to me up at the matrix together i'll e mail it back before tuesday  obviously please don't talk amongst ourselves with that as i make sense yes i just think the last time that we did this i know at the very end whatever was presented for financial proposals he had i remember and he had negotiated the final cost so like whatever is there it's a good point what would you have in the packages are what they're proposing right it's exact rings us into the negotiation table and then you can go through that process and it may be a failure and then you go to the next choice thoughts and we're not making a you know but we've got a little i mean we've got six six some people may think that was too many i thought there was a benefit for hearing  those in favor i thank you polly thank you it's a long night