If the Comm Court needed to hire an attorney to handle a civil lawsuit, do they have free reign to hire whom they want and pay what they want? I've read the AG opinion from the Fannin Co request, but I thought I read somewhere earlier that the Co Atty had some input on the selection of the attorney or the fee.

Whatever the AG may have suggested, I think the real answer to your question lies in the Supreme Court's opinion in Guynes v. Galveston County. The essential message of Guynes is that, so long as none of the county attorney's statutorily- or constitutionally-assigned functions are usurped, the commissioners court is free to contract, within its discretion, for the provision of civil representation services. For better or worse, the county attorney's opinion does not appear under Guynes to be a limitation on that discretion. If your commissioners respect your opinion (does that really happen?), however, they may ask you for your input anyway. In that event, they're free to assign whatever weight to your advice that they may see fit. Whether that's much or little weight often depends on what you've done for them lately.

Scott, thanks for the reference to the Guynes case. After reading the opinions, I believe it was wrongly decided, but decided it was. I guess we can thank "JC" for that!

Some counties may have unique provisions in the creation of their office which may give the county attorney a veto power. Others have added safeguards. For instance 89.001 of the Texas Local Government Code provides that we select outside counsel in our county since it is a county of more than 1 million. I realize that Delta is growing but still smaller , but you might look at the act creating your office, if any.