Attorney Gary Nolan recently won a case at the Massachusetts Civil Service Commission involving an interesting legal issue – particularly, the level of investigation by a City or Town required to bypass a candidate for hire. After a full hearing, the Commission found that the Town of Maynard’s investigation in this case was inadequate to justify bypassing the police officer candidate. As a large amount of civil service cases are driven by issues of fact, important in this case was identifying the important legal issues that would play a role in the decision, and providing a pre-hearing legal briefing of the issues to the hearing officer, which enabled the hearing officer to focus in on the issues as the evidence was presented. As a result, the officer candidate prevailed on his appeal, and was placed at the top of Civil Service the list for hire.
To read the decision, which has previously been released publicly by the Commission, click the link below: