Exclusive | MTA outsources millions of dollars in legal work to private firms but wont disclose total amount: No accountability

The MTA has been hiring pricey private lawyers to defend itself against injury claims — but refuses to reveal the full scale of the outsourced multimillion-dollar legal work and total cost to taxpayers. The agency, when pressed by The Post in response to a Freedom of Information Law request, admitted it paid more than $10 million to six law firms in recent years — but sources with knowledge of the situation claim that figure is just the tip of the fiscal iceberg. “Millions of dollars are being paid out to outside counsel, and there’s no accountability,” said a lawyer in the MTA division that helps oversee such cases. Six current and former MTA law-department employees told The Post the agency has increasingly outsourced such legal work despite having a cadre of in-house lawyers who historically would take on such cases.  That means taxpayers are shelling out both for the salaries of the MTA’s own lawyers — a team of nearly 60 staffers paid $121,000 a year on average as of 2024, according to court documents — and also for the private firms.MTA Communications Director Tim Minton responded, “Between Washington policies and ambulance-chasing lawyers, the MTA is increasingly the target of lawsuits, so we need to hire attorneys in the best position to fight back.”“We have been reviewing how torts litigation is handled, including by in-house lawyers and outside counsel,” he said.The MTA is meanwhile shelling out for record-high court verdicts and settlements — with a total of $687 million paid out between 2019 and 2024.That figure doesn’t factor in the hundreds of millions of dollars wracked up from recent record-breaking verdicts handled by outside counsel which are still winding through the appeals process.Aurora Beauchamp, a cancer survivor, won a staggering $72.5 million judgement in 2024 when she sued for injuries sustained when she was hit by an MTA bus.Staten Island-based law firm Sciretta & Venterina, LLP, which took the case ov...