In its ruling in June 2011, the Court of Appeals sided with 23 nonunion transportation companies that had sued the Education Department, and threw out such protection provisions as a violation of the state's competitive bidding laws.
If the competitive bidding laws were strictly followed, municipalities would have had to resubmit their electricity contracts for new bidding when deregulation allowed consumers to purchase energy cheaper from other regions, he said.
Several other experts on federal procurement said that while the government can avoid bidding laws in urgent or national security cases, they had never before seen a facility in one state created with the help of a recycled contract from another.
Alternatively, a potential vendor may approach and offer its services to a qualifying municipality that has not made a request for proposals; provided, however, that once the potential vendor approaches the municipality, the municipality shall follow the state's open bidding laws.
In a ruling this week, Justice Faviola Soto of State Supreme Court in Manhattan declared the contracts void and said the city had violated both state and city competitive-bidding laws.
The CLSA said there were "serious flaws" in the system including allegations that staff hired by the LAA were not professionally equipped to scrutinise the formal bids from law firms.
Last spring, Judge Kaplan received 20 confidential bids from law firms listing an amount the firms thought they could recover from Sotheby's and Christie's that would go entirely to the buyers and sellers.
The telecom decided a decade ago to approach it in a business-like manner by detailing its needs and then asking for bids from law firms.
For years, Thompson would talk about Bid's law office, "what it smelled like, with the pipe tobacco, all the papers and books, the atmosphere," recalls Thompson's brother, Ken.
