There is a time-honored, court-supported concept of privacy when it comes to dealings between a person and lawyer.

It’s an idea that extends to lots of areas of the law. You are guaranteed that your conversations with counsel will be as sacred as a Catholic confessional booth whether you are talking about your divorce, your will, your bankruptcy or a plea deal for a crime. Rich or poor, speaking with an attorney is inviolate.

Most of the time.

There are places where that doesn’t hold true. Sometimes attorney-client privilege doesn’t hold because of the nature of the conversation. If another person is there for the chat, you can’t say it was private. There are times when your lawyer isn’t actually your lawyer because you work for a larger entity that is the real client.

And then there are the times when you might have a legal right to attorney-client privilege but you have an ethical duty of transparency to the people. That is where things sit with state lawmakers paying millions to lawyers without much accountability to the taxpayers.

A Spotlight PA and The Caucus investigation has found Pennsylvania legislators have spent almost $10 million in just two years with little or no information released about the who or why.

This is important because more and more frequently, lawmakers of both parties are deciding to bypass debating an issue on the floor of their own chamber and walk across the street to file a lawsuit instead, tossing volatile issues into the courts for decisions. In 2020 and 2021, this has happened repeatedly with both the presidential election and the governor’s covid-19 restrictions.

But can we look at the records and see how much was spent on those issues? We can’t.

Lawyers who bill as much as $750 per hour are listed in records, but why they were hired and even by who often is redacted — again by Democrats and the GOP alike.

The problem with all that black ink obscuring this important data is the people always have a right to know what the public money is being spent to do. Having that information could mean a constituent would lobby his representative to stop pursuing a particular case, and if that doesn’t happen, vote for someone else in two years.

But another reason is to know exactly how much of a merry-go-round the money is riding. Many big-ticket lawyers are significant campaign donors. Redacted records keep the people from knowing whether a large donation today guarantees an even larger payday later.

K&L Gates, headquartered in Pittsburgh, is the biggest recipient on the list, with $1.8 million. This isn’t surprising as it also is one of the largest law firms in the country, if not the world, and that number makes up just a fraction of a percent of the partnership’s annual revenue.

But $1.8 million should never be casually dismissed as an expenditure from the state Legislature, even if it also seems dwarfed by $203 million lawmakers spent on their own food, travel and other perks.

For average Pennsylvanians, it’s an unimaginably large amount of money — more than they will ever see in a lifetime. It also originates in the pockets and paychecks of those everyday taxpayers who often can’t afford their own lawyers when they need them.

The very least the Legislature can do while spending the public’s money on lawyers who make more in an hour than a Walmart employee makes in a week is be open about what that money is being spent to do and by which lawmaker.

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