A hearing this morning is scheduled to conclude a battle joined in 1996, when the Allegheny County public defender's office hit rock bottom.

Newly elected county commissioners cut $1 million from the office's $3.9 million budget, eviscerating an already bare-bones operation and prompting a lawsuit.

"I just remember files stacked on the floor," said Michael Machen, then an attorney in the office, which represents people who cannot afford a lawyer. "There were these people who had been terminated, and that was their caseload."

Machen, now chief public defender, was among the members of the depleted staff who had to pick up those stacks of files and add them to their already full caseloads.

Later that year, three plaintiffs represented by the American Civil Liberties Union filed the class-action suit, alleging that "severe understaffing, excessive caseloads, inadequate policies and procedures and other systemic deficiencies" meant that "significant numbers of indigent persons represented by the office are in imminent danger" of having their Sixth and 14th Amendment rights violated.

On the eve of trial in 1998, an agreement was worked out by the parties -- the county, the ACLU and the United Steelworkers, the union representing the public defenders -- that mandated increased levels of funding and staffing and barred newly hired attorneys from having private practices.

The parties have been back in court over the ACLU's contention that the county was out of compliance with the agreement, and the original end date of Dec. 31, 2003, was eventually extended to this year.

The agreement, set forth in a consent decree, is to be formally ended at a hearing this morning before Common Pleas Judge Robert Horgos.

W. Thomas McGough Jr., the attorney appointed by Horgos the mediate the case, is credited with steering the parties through brutal negotiations, getting agreement on the framework of the consent decree and handling subsequent disputes over it.

"I met with everyone in the same room early on," he said. "In the next year and a half I don't think I did that again." Instead he practiced shuttle diplomacy, figuring out the fundamental issues and negotiating with each party separately.

All parties to the suit agree that the office today is better than it was before, though they disagree about whether it was a no-frills operation that offered adequate service to clients or an abysmal one because of severe underfunding.

"There have been a lot of improvements," said Witold Walczak, legal director of the Greater Pittsburgh chapter of the ACLU. "It's grown, it's professional, they do a lot of things better than they did before, they've got investigators, the lawyers get training ... The glass is 90 percent full -- our hope is that they will take the last few steps to make it truly first-rate."

The ACLU had known for several years that the office was substandard, Walczak said, and a 1995 American Bar Association study conducted by the Spangenberg Group concluded that it was one of the most under-resourced public defender's offices in the country. Three months later, the newly elected Republican majority commissioners, Larry Dunn and Bob Cranmer, slashed the office's budget, abruptly firing 15 of the office's 55 attorneys.

"It was a crisis situation to begin with," Walczak said at the time. "Now it's so bad the ACLU cannot look away."

The suit was filed on behalf of three indigent clients but sought to apply to all current and future cases that the public defender would handle. Taking on the county were Walczak, attorneys from the ACLU national office and Claudia Davidson of the firm Healy Davidson & Hornack.

Common Pleas Judge Lester Nauhaus, who headed the office for 17 years before being appointed a judge in 1994, disputed the contention that clients did not receive adequate representation prior to the consent decree. Public defenders were and are professionals who know their territory and who under sometimes difficult conditions performed their duties, he said.

Common Pleas Judge Jeffrey Manning said the issue was lack of resources, not the competence of those working in the public defender's office.

"I've always been of the opinion that public defenders are as good as criminal defense attorneys in private practice. Were they overworked and underpaid? Absolutely."

Now there are more than 80 lawyers on staff, and funding levels, support staff and resources have all increased. There are 20 "grandfathered" attorneys hired before the consent decree who still are permitted to have private practices.

County Solicitor Michael Wojcik said that when Dan Onorato became chief executive last year, he made getting out from under the consent decree a priority.

"We have paid the ACLU almost $1 million in fees and costs," Wojcik said. "We made a conscious decision that we'd rather pay our public defenders than Vic Walczak and his cohorts."

Machen said that when Onorato appointed him to head the office last year, "one of my goals was settlements of all issues related to the decree and to go even further."

He said he has focused on improving training for attorneys; instituting drug, sex assault and DUI units that focus on those types of cases; and aiming for as much "vertical representation" (having the same attorney represent the client throughout pretrial and trial proceedings) as possible. The ACLU had long complained that public defenders did not routinely meet with clients before their preliminary hearings; now it is policy that they do so, Machen said.

"The greatest improvement is that people don't languish in the county jail as sometimes occurred," said Manning.

Machen is working with the law firm of Kirkpatrick & Lockhart to form a nonprofit group, tentatively called the Allegheny County Indigent Defense Fund, to raise money. In light of tight budgets throughout government and the generally low level of public interest in channeling more money toward the defense of poor people charged with crimes, he said he wanted to find other ways of increasing resources, particularly for training.

Walczak said he still gets complaints about public defenders who don't meet with clients in a timely fashion or adequately prepare to represent them.

He remains concerned about life after the consent decree. There is nothing preventing the county from allowing the public defenders to again take on private practices, a system that almost inevitably decreases attention to indigent clients, he said.

Machen said he intends to go forward, not backward. "I was never threatened by the goals of the plaintiff lawyers because they were also my goals -- the best representation of clients. If the goal is to serve the client, then we can't be adversaries."