Official Information Request - Legal expenses

Sent: Friday, 14 April 2023 3:05 pm
Subject: LGOIMA request - legal expenses

I refer to your LGOIMA request of 6 March 2023 regarding legal expenses incurred by council, specifically your request for:

• Legal expenses incurred for the 2019/20, 2020/21, 2021/22, 2022/23 YTD years
• Yearly amounts paid to different legal firms
• Yearly totals allocated by each task or project
• Yearly totals allocated by each department

Please find attached a spreadsheet containing the information in relation to bullet points 1, 2 and 4.

To provide the information requested in bullet point 3 would necessitate a staff member to analyse every purchase order and/or invoice over the time period to ascertain the purpose for each of the purchase orders and/or invoices. This would take a considerable amount of staff time. For this reason this part of your request is declined under section 17(f) of the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act ‘that the information requested cannot be made available without substantial collation or research’.

You also requested a copy of the Procurement Policy for obtaining legal advice or if not one then the general policy that would have applied. Please find attached the current Procurement Policy.