Grapevine-Colleyville ISD sues to block release of school board lawyer invoices
The Grapevine-Colleyville school district has sued Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to challenge a ruling that the district must release unredacted invoices for legal work performed by a lawyer who represents the school board.
At issue are invoices submitted by Southlake attorney Tim Davis, who also represents the school boards in Keller and other North Texas districts. He filed the lawsuit on behalf of the district in a Travis County district court in late July after the Attorney General’s Office denied the district’s request to withhold unredacted invoices for his legal services to the district.
Davis provided legal counsel to Keller school board trustees during the attempt to split that district earlier this year. Lawsuits calling for the removal of the trustees involved claim that Davis facilitated secret discussions of the split which violated the Texas Open Meetings Act.
Davis declined to comment for this story.
The records request at the center of the GCISD lawsuit was filed by Rachel Wall, a parent of students in the district who has kept meticulous records of the district’s spending on Davis and other lawyers hired by GCISD.
Wall is also a lawyer in private practice who volunteers as legal director of the Texas Public Education Defense Fund, a nonprofit that works to “protect public education through legal advocacy,” according to its website. She emphasized that she performs her watchdog work with GCISD in her capacity as a district parent.
“I have concerns about the fact that my tax dollars have paid more than $500,000 in bills that are redacted in their entirety,” she said in a statement, referring to invoices from Davis’ law firms.
Check registers available online show that GCISD has paid Jackson Walker and Cantey Hanger, Davis’ previous law firm, over $510,000 since 2022.
At issue in the lawsuit is what is considered privileged attorney-client information. In April, Wall submitted an open records request for all “invoices received by GCISD from Jackson Walker, LLP from May 1, 2024 through March 31, 2025.”
In early May, Jackson Walker attorney Ali Williams appealed the request to the Attorney General’s Office, asking it to withhold the release of 17 pages of the documents responsive to the request and allow the redaction of information on other pages.
She cited statutes in the Texas Public Information Act that allow entities to block the release of documents related to litigation, documents protected under attorney-client privilege and documents that include banking information.
Williams did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Paxton’s office responded on July 1 by saying the district did not have grounds to withhold all of the requested documentation. The Attorney General’s Office found that some of the information requested could be withheld due to attorney-client privilege, and that the district must redact banking information like account and routing numbers, but that it “must release the remaining information.”
The Attorney General’s Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The school district argues in the lawsuit that it should “be authorized to withhold the entirety of the invoices,” or that it be allowed to redact all of the descriptions of the services rendered on the invoices.
Responding at 6 p.m. Wednesday, more than 24 hours after this story ran, a GCISD spokesperson said the district “simply disagrees” with the attorney general’s decision on the matter.
“The attorney-client privilege is a ‘time-tested’ and honored legal exception to the disclosure of legal advice between attorney and client,” she said. “Any information that reveals legal advice or strategy, and in particular information that relates to pending litigation or potential litigation, should remain confidential between the client and its attorney.”
A similar story has played out in the Keller school district since it hired Davis to represent the school board. Since June 2022, the district has paid out over half a million dollars to the law firms he worked for. His most recent invoice to the district, which the Star-Telegram received through an open records request, was for almost $172,000 for work performed between January and May of this year.
Earlier this month, Williams asked Paxton’s office to allow the district to withhold the release of subsequent invoices that the Star-Telegram asked for in an open records request.
“I certainly understand, and agree, that some information in the attorney fee bills would be privileged,” Wall said. “However, not all of the entries would be privileged in their entirety.”
The attorney general’s office has ruled in recent years that billing entries are not privileged in their entirety — twice in GCISD and once in Carroll ISD — and indicated that the records in those requests be released to the requesting parties.
“However, despite requests for transparency, and while cuts are being made to programs and campuses, our limited resources are being used instead to file lawsuits appealing these attorney general rulings in order to prevent the release of the non-privileged parts of those bills,” Wall said.
Davis was also recently hired to represent Tarrant County District Clerk Tom Wilder in a lawsuit seeking his removal in relation to his handling of a case in family court. The Tarrant County Commissioners Court was set to consider hiring him in a separate similar case against Wilder on Tuesday.
This story was originally published August 19, 2025 at 3:22 PM.
