LA city attorney accused of ethics breach before settling major case for $18M

It was one of the higher-profile lawsuits against the city of L.A. over the past year.

Two brothers in their 70s said they suffered serious injuries — including fractured skulls and spines — from a speeding LAPD officer crashing into the side of their car at 55 mph.

An investigator for the police department determined the officer was at fault for driving at an unsafe speed.

The city ultimately settled in the middle of the trial this September for $18 million.

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It’s one of the city’s most expensive lawsuit settlements over the past few years, at a time the city has cut services due to a fiscal crisis driven largely by sharply rising legal payouts.

An accusation in the case, however, has gone unreported. Days before settling the case, lawyers for the plaintiffs accused L.A.’s elected city attorney of an ethics breach.

As the case was about to go to trial, City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto called an expert witness for the plaintiffs, “attempted to ingratiate herself with him and asked him to make a contribution to her political campaign,” according to a sworn declaration to the court by the plaintiffs’ attorney, Robert Glassman.

At the time of her Aug. 16 call, the expert witness — a neurosurgeon named Andrew Fox — was on the official witness list for the upcoming trial and had been deposed by the city’s attorneys.

According to a filing by the plaintiffs, Feldstein Soto made the call while the city owed Fox $5,000 to $6,000 in overdue deposition fees for the time the city spent questioning him before trial.

By asking for a campaign donation from a testifying expert, Glassman alleged Feldstein Soto violated a state ethics rule for attorneys, which he wrote “forbids interfering with any party’s orderly access to a witness’ testimony.”

“Through her ex parte communications and political solicitation designed to privately cultivate favor with plaintiffs’ retained expert, she attempted to compromise plaintiffs’ access to Dr. Fox’s accurate and unbiased testimony,” Glassman wrote in his Sept. 5 filing disclosing the call to the court.

“It placed Dr. Fox in an untenable bind, where any given response to her overtures invites pressure and a sense of obligation,” he added.

The city attorney’s conduct, he alleged, was “improper and corrosive to the integrity of this trial.”

Six work days after Grossman’s accusations, Feldstein Soto’s office asked the city council for a closed session discussion where they greenlit settling the case. The $18 million settlement — handled by the city attorney's second-in-command — was finalized before Fox was scheduled to take the witness stand in the trial.

Feldstein Soto did not respond to an interview request through her spokesperson, Karen Richardson.

In an emailed response to questions, Richardson said the settlement “had nothing to do with Dr. Fox” and “was a product of balancing comparative negligence with the amount and payment terms upon which the agreement was reached.”

Her campaign manager, Robb Korinke, told LAist the city attorney had been making a routine fundraising call. He said Feldstein Soto did not know Fox had a role in the case, nor that there were pending requests for her office to pay him fees.

“Hydee had no awareness of his involvement in the case,” Korinke said. “He didn’t disclose that he was involved in this case, nor did he donate.”

How did he end up on the call list?

Feldstein Soto called Fox because he was a donor to other campaigns in the county, Korinke told LAist.

While Fox does not appear in searches of city and county campaign contribution databases, Korinke provided LAist with an image of a fundraiser invite for Nathan Hochman — when he was running for district attorney — that listed Fox and his wife as co-hosts. Fox did not respond to multiple phone messages for comment left with receptionists at his office.

Asked if Feldstein Soto’s campaign checked whether people she was going to ask for donations had pending matters before the city attorney’s office so they could be screened out, Korinke said he couldn’t speak to that because he’s not the fundraiser.

“Obviously, if Hydee recognizes someone she knows, she wouldn’t call them, but I don’t know what additional vetting they may have,” he said. “She has no intention of knowingly contacting anyone that would have such a conflict.”

Retired Judge Jeremy Fogel said the city attorney’s phone call would not be something the State Bar would follow up on for an ethics review if — as her campaign manager said — she did not know Fox was an expert witness in the case, and thus, it sounds like there was no intentional wrongdoing.

But, he said, it raises the question of whether she or her team should be doing conflict checks before asking for campaign money.

“It’s not a bad idea” to run checks before soliciting money, said Fogel, who was on the state and federal bench for more than three decades and now leads the Berkeley Judicial Institute at UC Berkeley’s law school.

“When you have the resources we have now within information, you could probably find it in an electronic database. It might not be an undue burden,” Fogel said.

Nowadays, he said, software exists that helps flag potential conflicts based on comparing lists of names.

“It’s just saying you’ve got a case, here’s the witness list, and if you’re going to solicit money, you should at least run a comparison so that you’re not inadvertently soliciting somebody who's on the other team. It would certainly be a good practice,” Fogel said.

When serving as a mediation judge, Fogel said, he would do a conflict check to make sure he wasn’t handling a case where he knew one of the witnesses.

Past controversies

Brought into office by voters in late 2022, Feldstein Soto runs the largest elected city attorney’s office in the country. More than 500 attorneys work under her.

In addition to serving as the city’s top lawyer — representing the city in lawsuits and giving legal advice to city leaders — the city attorney also is in charge of prosecuting misdemeanor crimes within city boundaries.

Feldstein Soto has been the focus of past controversies.

In 2023, she picked a major campaign donor with a problematic history to lead a major homeless housing provider without noting her campaign money connection.

Months later, Feldstein Soto said the man she put in charge failed to make progress in fixing serious safety problems, failed to hire enough staff and wrongfully told 451 tenants they’d be evicted.

Feldstein Soto ultimately said she made a mistake recommending him and acknowledged not fully vetting his background.

In high-profile proceedings she observed in a homelessness lawsuit, Feldstein Soto allowed the city to incur over $3 million in outside lawyer bills without telling the city council, despite the council authorizing just $900,000 for it. That prompted public frustration from some council members.

In September, a longtime city prosecutor alleged in a sworn declaration that Feldstein Soto unlawfully demanded the dismissal of a case because the defendant was represented by a friend and maximum campaign donor. A spokesperson for Feldstein Soto has said the allegations are untrue.