Attorney General Mark Pettingill has come under fire from the Opposition over a $700,000 settlement of a legal battle regarding the Dame Lois Browne-Evans building.During a prolonged question and answer segment in the House of Assembly, Progressive Labour Party MPs suggested that Mr Pettingill had made the decision to settle unilaterally, with Opposition Leader Marc Bean asking when the Attorney General would offer his resignation.Mr Pettingill however maintained the Government had no real defence and taxpayers could have been left paying more than $2 million if the matter reached trial.“In order to settle the case, one looks at what the pleadings are and determines whether it’s viable or not. It wasn’t viable,” he said. “I wouldn’t have put the country at risk of $2.5 million in expenses for this case.”Architects Carruthers Shaw and Partner (CS&P) sued the Government in 2010 for $1.4 million after being taken off the Dame Lois Browne-Evans building. Government subsequently submitted a counterclaim.Mr Pettingill announced last week that the matter had been settled at a cost of $700,000, saying the Government counterclaim was without merit.Shadow Public Works Minister Derrick Burgess said Government, along with its technical experts, met with CS&P to explain the counterclaim. Mr Burgess said several examples of negligence in the design were broached during the meeting, including that the planned foundations stretched four feet into neighbouring property and a stairway which led directly into a ceiling.Mr Pettingill responded that one of the fundamental problems with the case was that large portions of the complainant’s work were used in the final design.Mr Pettingill said: “That’s the problem. The ability to claim negligence when you embrace it and use it, what you describe as negligent which they deny. That’s the problem of the case, because the answer back would have been: ‘But you used all our stuff.’“Probably the lead witness, the key witness for the plaintiff against the Government had we run this case, would have been the Government’s own senior architect. That’s what nonsense it became.“There very well may have been points with merit that were raised by technical officers. The difficulty was that in weighing the whole of the case it would not have succeeded.”Mr Pettingill said that of the claims of the plaintiffs, $200,000 was in relation to the Marsh Folly project, but Mr Burgess said the drawings in relation to that site were only 65 percent completed, questioning if the AG had informed the Cabinet of that fact.“I did not inform the Cabinet of that specific number,” Mr Pettingill responded. “What I informed the Cabinet of was on the balance of what was being claimed and what was being pursued, that $700,000 was actually good for us as a settlement and we were likely to incur in excess of $2 million if we took the case to full trial.”Shadow Finance Minister David Burt meanwhile questioned several specific areas of the claims made by the plaintiffs, including what he said CS&P admitted were more than $1 million of undue anticipated earnings and a $206,000 invoice which Government paid in 2008.Between those two sums, Mr Burgess said the only cost in the plaintiff’s case outstanding was around $200,000 — $500,000 less than the settlement value.Mr Pettingill said: “The claim is effectively that they were owed $1.4 million at the time they were wrongfully terminated without cause. The claim was settled for $700,000. It may well be that amounts were taken into account. [Mr Burt] is pulling numbers out and referencing settlements that are probably retained in the volumes of documents in this case.”Responding to questions by Glenn Blakeney, Mr Pettingill refused to say which attorneys outside the Government he consulted with on the matter or their firms. However, he said no attorneys outside of Government were retained or paid by Government.“I did not pay, or the Government did not pay, any external attorney in relation to advice on this matter,” he said.