Brett Bacon: Exploitative Counsel

Why It Matters

County attorneys like Brett Bacon are the moving parts that turn misconduct, defective paperwork, and retaliatory decisions into court-approved results. Judges do not draft the County’s narrative: counsel does. When altered orders are presented as valid, when unsigned or re-dated notices are treated as binding, and when ADA failures are reframed as a pro se litigant’s fault, it is because an attorney chose that strategy and put it in front of the court.

In Strickland v. Ramsey County et al., Bacon appears as one of those attorneys. Instead of treating the record irregularities and ADA violations as problems to be corrected, his filings treat them as assets to be weaponized: grounds for dismissal, collateral estoppel, and procedural default. This page documents that role and places it alongside his other public work, including high-profile federal litigation and a 2025 CLE course on how governments should respond when citizens organize social-media pressure campaigns against public employees.

A Documented Pattern

Public records show Bacon serving as counsel for Ramsey County and its top officials across a range of cases in the District of Minnesota and state courts. In Minnesota Chamber of Commerce v. Choi, File No. 23‑cv‑2015, he appears on the caption as counsel for Ramsey County Attorney John Choi, defending the County’s role in enforcing state campaign-finance restrictions against constitutional challenge. In Tucker v. Smith et al., Ramsey County Court File No. 62‑CV‑25‑1086, a July 2025 settlement agreement resolving civil-rights claims lists Bacon (Attorney No. 0400776) as counsel of record for the “Ramsey County Defendants,” alongside Assistant County Attorney Kristine Nogosek and County Attorney John Choi.

In each of these matters, Bacon’s job is the same: keep the County insulated from legal and financial consequences. Whether the underlying dispute involves campaign-finance limits, alleged civil-rights violations, or ADA failures, the County’s posture is consistent: resist disclosure, resist accountability, and resolve the case on terms that minimize scrutiny of how Ramsey County actually treated the people in its custody or under its authority.

His entry into Strickland continues that pattern. By stepping into a federal civil-rights case built on altered state-court orders, missing signatures, and denied accommodations, Bacon had an opportunity to correct the record and distinguish his office from the conduct that preceded him. Instead, his motion practice embraced the defective record as the County’s best tool: a way to argue that nothing more should be heard.

Procedural and Financial Pressure

Bacon’s filings in Strickland are not about fact-finding or repair; they are about control. One of his early actions was to file a motion to dismiss that attached the Ramsey County Register of Actions as an exhibit, a document that, when read closely, shows out-of-order index numbers, backfilled signatures, and dates that do not match what actually happened in the underlying harassment case. Rather than flagging those anomalies as potential evidence of systemic problems, he invited the federal court to treat the Register as authoritative and to use it as a basis to shut the case down.

This strategy lands hardest on disabled, low-income litigants. On paper, Bacon’s arguments look like neutral “Rule 12” practice: missed deadlines, jurisdictional challenges, technical defaults. In reality, those “defects” arise from the same barriers Ramsey County created, refused accommodations, opaque procedures, and orders that were never properly entered in the first place. When county counsel leans on those flaws instead of acknowledging them, the result is not just dismissal: it is punishment for having tried to seek help.

Bacon’s work turns access problems, record defects, and ADA failures into leverage, and then bills that leverage as “defense of the County.”

The economic reality is simple: Ramsey County is publicly funded and can absorb years of motion practice. Disabled pro se plaintiffs on SSI cannot. Each new procedural volley, each notice keyed to an inaccurate certificate of service, each argument that a missing signature does not matter, transfers more cost and risk from the institution that created the mess to the individual trying to survive it.

Control Beyond the Courtroom

Bacon’s work extends past litigation and into shaping how government attorneys conceptualize criticism, dissent, and public pressure. In 2025, he is scheduled to present a continuing legal education course titled Handling Social Media Pressure Campaigns About a Government Employee’s Private Social Media Post, offering one hour of standard CLE credit. The promotional material describes him as an ”Assistant Ramsey County Attorney” and outlines a curriculum focused on the Pickering test, disciplinary options for public-employee speech, and ”real life examples” of how online communities link personal social-media accounts to government employment to drive accountability campaigns.

At face value, the course frames itself as a neutral legal update. But its timing and content are striking when placed alongside Bacon’s conduct in Strickland v. Ramsey County. Within days of entering the case, he sent curt and procedurally incorrect emails demanding that a disabled pro se litigant cease serving documents to him, despite the rules requiring service on counsel of record. He then moved to dismiss the case using a Register of Actions riddled with defects, treating the irregularities not as problems to be corrected but as footholds for technical arguments. His tone, both in email and on paper, reflects not neutrality, but a posture of condescension toward unrepresented parties navigating ADA barriers he never acknowledged.

Seen together, the CLE course and his litigation conduct create a unified picture. The course teaches lawyers how to defuse or contain online scrutiny: how to react when community members connect a government employee’s public role with their private conduct. In litigation, Bacon’s approach mirrors that training: minimize the significance of public documentation, treat court-record defects as nonissues, and position the County as the victim of overreach rather than the cause of procedural failures. The fact that he now finds himself the subject of a significant web presence: indexed, organized, and publicly archived-adds a layer of personal relevance to his new foray into teaching others how to manage ”pressure campaigns.”

Public Records and Everyday Power

The documents collected in this archive, settlement agreements, federal opinions, state-court data summaries, and Bacon’s own promotional materials, do not require speculation. They show an assistant county attorney who consistently appears on the side of institutional power: defending enforcement actions, negotiating settlements that disclaim liability, and asking courts to treat irregular records as authoritative when doing so benefits the County.

None of this makes him unique inside Ramsey County’s system. That is what makes it important. When people like Bacon are treated as anonymous functionaries whose choices are never examined, patterns of retaliation and record manipulation can continue indefinitely, each case sealed off as an “unfortunate one-off.” By placing his name, filings, and public presentations in one place, this dossier aims to show how those “one-offs” fit together into something larger: a culture that treats disabled and marginalized residents as problems to be managed, not neighbors entitled to rights.