Checking the regular traps again turned up a couple of very interesting items.

The first involves interesting fallout from attorney John Komeiji’s departure from his former firm to take a corporate position at Hawaiian Telcom.

It seems that Komeiji was under contract to serve as lead trial counsel defending the state and the Department of Education in a federal trial scheduled to begin in early September. Plaintiffs in the case are seeking millions in damages for the state’s alleged failure to provide certain special education services.

Mr. Komeiji notified us earlier this month (July) that he will be leaving his law firm before the end of the month to serve as general counsel for Hawaiian Telcom, and will not be able to take the consolidated cases with him, or do any further work on the cases after he leaves the law firm;

The consolidated cases are presently scheduled to be tried to a jury in the federal district court…on September 9, 2008.

Although there have been three other attorneys in Komeiji’s former law firm working on the case, the AG says “none is sufficiently experienced to try the case himself.” Similarly, none of the deputy AGs are considered capable of taking the lead.

I looked up one of the cases, which involves a damage claim against the DOE and the state for failing to provide special education services ordered and agreed to in previous negotiations. In this case alone, the plaintiffs are asking for more than $7 million in damages. Click here to check out their pretrial view of the case.

So now the Attorney General is requesting an exemption from standard procurement in order to hire attorney Kenneth Robbins to step in at the last minute to litigate the case with an estimated cost of up to $100,000.

I have to wonder what Komeiji’s firm has been paid up to now and whether the firm will have to refund some of their fees now that they will be unable to provide the trial defense they had apparently agreed to provide. Are the AG’s contracts with private attorneys loose enough to allow them to walk away at the last minute without consequences?

This also underscores Komeiji’s stature as a litigator and the unusual nature of this move into the corporate world.

Another pending exemption request exposes problems with the Public Utilities Commission’s new electronic Document Management System. The original contract with The Dayhuff Group was awarded in 2005 and called for getting the system up and running by the beginning of 2007, as well as scanning and importing older documents into the system.

But unspecified problems held up the new system for 16 months and it finally went “live” in April 2008. However, documents filed from January 2007 through April 2008 were not imported into the system and the commission is attempting to fast track scanning at an estimated cost of an additional $75,000.

The public will not be allowed to access the system until these missing records are added. What’s worse, the contract included only six months of support, and now it appears that there won’t be enough time to get open the system to public access and deal with bugs or problems before the support period expires.

If not, the Commission will likely be unable to receive full technical support and expertise from DG to address issues that likely will arise once the DMS is accessible to the public without having to incur hourly costs under a future maintenance contract.

So is this the result of unavoidable problems? Bad management? Inquiring minds want to know.

And, on a different note, Damon Tucker, a reader on the Big Island, let me know about his new blog. It’s worth checking out.