'They can't afford to stay': Do Louisville prosecutors, lawyers need higher starting pay?

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Jefferson County is losing too many attorneys and prosecutors for better-paying private law firms and corporate jobs, and Louisville Metro Council members need to boost starting salaries to keep them, their superiors say.

Younger, newly hired attorneys whose duties included defending indigent residents or representing the county in litigation are starting at $45,000 a year.

And in a competitive labor market, that pay rate is not cutting it for numerous employees with law degrees and, in some cases, a fair amount of student debt, county leaders say.

"Most of the time, our employees are telling us they don’t want to leave but that they can’t afford to stay," Ingrid Geiser, first assistant to Jefferson County Attorney Mike O'Connell, said Wednesday during her office's budget hearing in Metro Council chambers.

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One prosecutor, for example, said they needed to put $200 each month on their credit cards to pay their bills, Geiser said.

The Jefferson County Attorney's Office, which handles civil, criminal and child support cases, has 265 employees, 107 of whom are attorneys, Geiser said.

The criminal division has seen a 47% decrease in attorneys since March 2021. Geiser told The Courier Journal, "we have been replacing the prosecutors who have left for other opportunities."

The county attorney's office staff have left for higher-paying jobs at places like the Jefferson Commonwealth Attorney's Office, Humana, Louisville Water Co. or private law firms, according to Geiser.

Geiser said county attorney's office employees have also compared themselves to other city staff, like Louisville Metro Police officers whom the Metro Council voted last year to give a 15% pay bump through 2023.

"The one thing that kept coming out of our younger prosecutors’ mouths earlier in the year … (was) the new police officers are going to be making $56,000 a year, and we're law school graduates and we're making ($45,000)," Geiser said.

As part of its roughly $14.2 million budget proposal for the 2023 fiscal year, Geiser said the Jefferson County Attorney's Office is seeking $330,000 to raise starting annual attorney salaries to $55,000 and give "proportional" raises to 33 prosecutors.

In addition, 14 support staff who assist attorneys with paperwork and various other tasks make less than $17 an hour, so Geiser said the office wants to raise them to $17 an hour.

And to help retain "younger attorneys," Geiser said the office is requesting $92,000 to give raises to seven of its lowest-paid civil attorneys, “a well-deserved increase because they are working very hard."

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Metro Councilman Markus Winkler, D-17th District, encouraged the office to be "creative" while staying within the law when trying to retain both the city and state-funded staff.

"Amazon's paying $21 an hour. Costco pays well over $20 an hour. Target and Best Buy start at at least $15 an hour," Winkler said Wednesday. "To my knowledge, none of those require a law degree to work in any of those locations."

For his final budget in charge, Louisville Mayor Fischer Greg Fischer has pitched a $1.3 billion spending plan for the fiscal year that begins July 1.

Metro Council members can put forward their own amendments before voting on the budget June 23.

The mayor said last month inflation and personnel costs eat up a significant chunk of the budget's general fund, with numerous departments still seeing plenty of job openings after city workers received at least 8% raises last year.

Public defenders also seeing turnover amid unionization debate

Leaders from the Louisville-Jefferson County Public Defender Corp. were among the agency representatives who also shared their requests and concerns this week during hearings on the upcoming 2023 fiscal year budget.

Public defenders, who represent indigent adults and juveniles in court, start at $45,000 annually in Louisville.

The national average salary at entry level for public defenders is $66,193 per year, according to a survey cited last year by Law360.

Chief Public Defender Leo Smith told Metro Council members Monday the pay rate is making it difficult to attract and retain staff in his office, which has 53 of its 78 positions filled. He said it is "not unusual" for the public defenders to work 60 hours a week.

While discussing his office's $4.5 million budget request for 2023, an increase over this year's roughly $4.2 million budget, Smith noted the starting public defender salary is the same as the starting rate for the Commonwealth Attorney's Office at the local level and the Kentucky Department of Public Advocacy at the statewide level.

While public defenders in other parts of the state who work for the Department of Public Advocacy may see their starting pay soon rise to $52,000 a year, Smith said "we don't know at this time" if Louisville public defenders could receive a pay raise.

Smith said his office is by no means the only local entity in Louisville and other cities seeking solutions to turnover amid the "chronic problem" of "inadequate salaries and excessive caseloads."

But Smith and the Metro Public Defender's office currently deal with an additional question — whether their attorneys should be allowed to unionize.

Public defenders in Louisville voted 32 to 5 in January to unionize with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local Union 369.

The union said following the vote that the attorneys faced "untenable working conditions."

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Union officials have recently complained that Smith and management have “refused to bargain" with them, but Smith said his office is waiting on a ruling over whether public defenders can unionize, with the decision coming first from the Kentucky Bar Association's ethics committee before going to the Kentucky Supreme Court.

"Contrary to what has and is being said, I am not opposed to unions," Smith said. "However, I have legal, ethical and fiduciary responsibilities to our indigent clients that are paramount to any personal views or preferences I may have."

The current average caseloads for public defenders is 110 clients per attorney, Smith said, but the union has claimed that figure is really 200 to 350 cases.

Metro Councilwoman Cassie Chambers Armstrong, D-8th, who is an assistant law professor at the University of Louisville, said "salary and caseloads are really creating this crisis."

“It’s making it so that bright young people who really want to make a difference, do criminal defense, do it for folks who can’t afford attorneys," she said, "either aren’t going into the field or aren’t staying there once they’re in."

Reach Billy Kobin at bkobin@courierjournal.com.

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Attorneys, prosecutors of Jefferson County, Louisville seek pay raises