TULSA (AP) – A New York-based children’s advocacy group that sued Oklahoma over its alleged mistreatment of foster children billed the state for more than $9.5 million in legal fees it says it racked up during the four years leading up to a January settlement.

Children’s Rights filed its request in federal court late Monday claiming its attorneys devoted more than 36,000 working hours to the class-action lawsuit that ended with Oklahoma agreeing to overhaul its foster care system.

The group notes in the filing that the settlement of the lawsuit, which it brought in 2008, removed “a culture of denial and inattention” and “a system with no accountability” in favor of an open agency that “may well serve as a model for systems across the country.”

The amount is more than double the $4 million the Legislature allocated to spend on the nonprofit’s attorneys’ fees – an amount that Department of Human Services spokeswoman Sheree Powell said Tuesday was “a clear message from the Legislature that the state of Oklahoma is not an open checkbook.”

“We will closely examine Children’s Rights’ time and expense records and, where appropriate, challenge them before the court,” Powell said in a statement Tuesday. “Ultimately, the court will determine the reasonableness of their hourly rates and their hours expended.”

Marcia Robinson Lowry, Children’s Rights executive director, said the state is welcome to examine the group’s billing records.

“It is a little surprising given how much this state was willing to spend to defend the lawsuit,” said Lowry, referring the near-$7 million cost to DHS so far. “I’ve never seen a case with a system as bad as this one with a defense as expensive as this was.

“If the state wants to spend its money this way, that’s their decision,” she said.

The settlement resulted in the so-called Pinnacle Plan, the state’s $153 million plan for overhauling the foster care system over the next five years.

The plan would place all children younger than 2 years old in a family-like setting rather than a group shelter by the end of the year and establish a training program for Department of Human Services staff by July 1, 2013. It also calls for increasing the number of foster families in the state, hiring more child welfare specialists, lightening specialists’ case loads and more frequent communication with foster families.

Lawmakers this session boosted funding for the agency by $50 million, with half of that money allocated to helping implement changes to its child-welfare programs. The additional funds brought the agency’s overall state appropriation to $587 million.

“It’s clearly an extraordinary settlement,” Lowry said Tuesday. “It’s certainly all we could wish for our clients and a measure of how dysfunctional this system was.”

The 2008 lawsuit accused Oklahoma of victimizing foster children by not finding “safe and adequate” homes for them and not adequately monitoring their safety “due to an overburdened and mismanaged work force.” It also alleged that the state agency failed to provide for the basic safety of foster children in ways that “threaten their ability to live normal childhoods, to grow and develop and, in many instances, to even survive.”