SUPER LAWYERS profiles TGH Partner Andy Hirth

From the Outside

Former deputy general counsel Andy Hirth is still working to improve the government

By Amy White on November 7, 2024 | Published in 2024 Missouri & Kansas Super Lawyers magazine

Andy Hirth wanted to be a man of the people, but, as an adjunct professor of English at the University of Missouri, the people he found himself surrounded by were often the fictional type. “I felt called to do something different, and I thought that different thing was being a lawyer,” he says.

Post-law school, Hirth wound up working for a big firm in Chicago for three years. But he couldn’t shake the feeling of wanting to be of service. “I never felt like I was doing the right thing in Chicago,” he says. “I made a lot of money, but I was basically defending big corporations who were suing each other.”

So in 2010, Hirth made a call to an old friend—Matt Dameron, who was chief of staff to Chris Koster, then Missouri’s attorney general—to see about a job. Koster hired him immediately, and Hirth went into the litigation division. “I represented the state against civil lawsuits, a lot of prisoner and employment cases,” he says. “Then I got promoted to deputy general counsel, which gave me the ability to do more of what I wanted to do, which was constitutional law. I wanted to use my law degree to help the government do its primary job: serve the people of Missouri.”

As he walked into the role that summer, the AG’s office was entrenched in a $1.14 billion contract dispute with Big Tobacco that originated in 2003 and touched 46 states and 30 companies. Missouri had lost in arbitration and was on the hook for $70 million; Hirth wrote an appeal to the state Supreme Court, which resulted in $50 million being returned to Missouri. “That’s probably the biggest thing I did there. That money was earmarked for early childhood education, smoking cessation and other health care programs,” he says. “The people that felt the direct effect of that work were the kids in programs like Head Start and low-income folks who get medical benefits paid for by the state.”

As deputy general counsel, Hirth also defended state statutes from constitutional challenge and brought claims under others.

An example of the latter was Macks Creek Law, which seeks to limit the amount of a municipality’s annual funding that can come from traffic tickets. “It’s a disincentive to write too many traffic tickets, but it hadn’t been enforced in a while,” Hirth says. “After the Michael Brown shooting [in 2014] a lot of attention got paid to the ways municipalities were really preying upon [communities of color] to fund their budgets by writing parking tickets. When those people didn’t show up to their court dates, then the fines start coming. … It was basically a huge moneymaking scheme. [Officers] were stopping people for ‘driving while Black’ to fund their municipalities. Chris Koster said, ‘We really ought to do something about this.’”

Hirth sued nearly 25 municipalities who took money using these practices and didn’t turn it over to the Missouri Department of Revenue, as mandated. “We didn’t get a judgment, but we got that money back, and in turn, these municipalities are much more mindful of the limitations,” he says.

The Hancock Amendment, which Hirth calls “one of the worst things the state of Missouri has ever done,” was at the center of his defense of the interdistrict school transfer law in 2015. “If you want to know why Missouri’s government and schools are chronically underfunded, it’s because of Hancock—which says the Legislature cannot increase taxes beyond a certain amount each year without a popular vote.”

Students who wanted to transfer out of underfunded, nonaccredited city schools in favor of accredited suburban schools could do so. But the interdistrict school transfer law required the district from which a student transferred to pay the school they were transferring to. Taxpayers from within the suburban districts began suing Kansas City Public Schools and the state.

“Their argument was, ‘Those schools are already failing. How are they going to pay us?’ Suburban schools didn’t want to have this new pressure put on them and have students coming from other districts. I think, frankly, there was some racist motivation in part. Also, there were legitimate financial concerns, although probably overblown,” says Hirth. “Then there were folks on the other side saying, ‘This is going to hurt Kansas City schools: It’s going to take students out of here; it’s going to take money out of their pockets. It’s going to be harder to become reaccredited if they’re losing money.’ People were split over this political game of football. At the AG’s office, we took the position of, ‘This law is to benefit the kids. This is not about who pays for what. This is saying kids have a right to a public education, and if your school is failing, you should be able to go to a school that’s not.’”

Hirth defended the law at the Missouri Supreme Court and prevailed. “We were very proud of defending that law,” he says, “because we thought it was the right thing to do.”

Had Hirth had it his way, his firm, Columbia’s TGH Litigation, would not exist. When Koster ran for governor on the Democratic ticket in 2016, Hirth and two of his AGO colleagues were ready to follow their guy to the governor’s office.

“Eric Greitens won. It saddens me to this day to think about what could have been,” Hirth says. “We all thought Chris was going to win. So not only was he not going to be governor, but then [current U.S. Sen.] Josh Hawley won the race to replace him as attorney general, and none of us wanted to work for Josh Hawley.”

So Hirth, Joanna Trachtenberg, and Julianne Germinder went into private practice. “We opened this firm in mid-Missouri to take civil rights cases because there really wasn’t anyone here doing it,” he says. “We went from the people that defended the government to the people who sue the government, but I still consider that doing the job of improving government. … We couldn’t continue to do it from the inside, so we decided we’d do it from the outside.”

The firm is currently involved in the “Kids in the Box” suits against the Columbia Public School District for its alleged practice of hiring contractors to build structures specifically for the district’s disabled students.

“This central building was allegedly for more supervised care for these kids, a number of whom are on the autism spectrum,” Hirth says. “One of the things that the district started doing, and that this contractor did in particular, was [create spaces] using isolation and seclusion to allegedly help these kids calm down—a ‘zen den’ or a ‘calm-down room.’”

Hirth alleges that, over time, these rooms got smaller and smaller—until ultimately, the district had the contractor build 4-by-6 “plywood closets.”

“You’d have an autistic kid in class who would act out, and they would put them in one of these rooms, and hold them in there until they calmed down,” says Hirth. “There’s no water or facilities, so the kids would urinate on themselves or worse. A lot of parents didn’t know this was happening because many of the kids put in these spaces were nonverbal.”

Hirth’s team is handling two cases for families and also representing a whistleblower who was employed by the district. It’s tough work, with difficult facts, Hirth says, but it fits the bill of what the firm set out to do.

“The one thing we all brought with us from the AG’s office was that desire to lift up the people, to make our government better, our schools better, our systems better,” he says. “This work is how you hold [power] accountable. The driving principle behind all of this is to make our community and our institutions do better.”