Want one good reason Dallas County may not want to dig its heels in too deeply in a legal battle over bail reform? How about 5 million?

In less than two years, that — more than $5 million and counting — is how much Harris County has spent fending off the federal lawsuit brought by the Civil Rights Corps, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit that teamed up with the Texas Fair Defense Project and a Houston law firm to overhaul the county's cash bail system.

That doesn't include the cost of staff attorneys and other Harris County officials caught up in the litigation. That's just the price for the three outside law firms hired to handle a complex case that's still working its way through the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals and, so far, isn't going the county's way.

"I think we have approximately eight different individual assistant attorneys involved," said Robert Soard, first assistant county attorney at the Harris County district attorney's office. "It's a massive litigation."

Harris officials told me this week that they've tried to settle the case since Day One but haven't been able to reach an agreement in large part because the parties haven't been able to balance concerns over public safety while making it easier for defendants to be set free.

If their goal, Soard said, is to wipe out cash bails even in cases involving violence, "and no matter how many times a defendant comes to court — 10, 15 or 20 times — and they have to be let out of jail after 24 hours no matter what ... how do you settle a case like that and still preserve public safety?"

But civil rights activists and civil libertarians involved in both cases, in Dallas and Harris counties, say their goal is simple: to make sure everyone is afforded due process and equal protection of the law.

"No person should be kept in a cage just because she doesn't have enough money to make a payment," Elizabeth Rossi, an attorney for Civil Rights Corps, said in a prepared statement. The group is behind the lawsuits in both counties.

The devil is in the details. There also are some sore feelings involved.

Officials in Harris and Dallas counties said they already were taking steps to overhaul their cash bail systems when they were hit with the lawsuits. They accuse the groups behind the lawsuits of exploiting the issue to take credit for any changes. Harris County officials say they'd been working on a reform plan for more than a year and were just weeks away from announcing it when they were sued in May 2016.

Less than a year later, in April, U.S. District Judge Lee Rosenthal overturned the county's bail system for people charged with misdemeanor crimes, saying it violated the Constitution and disproportionately affected indigent residents. Harris County has appealed that ruling to the 5th Circuit, which could render a decision any day.

But the ruling already has had a profound impact by breathing life into the movement to end cash bail systems around the country.

It also put Dallas on notice.

Yet, while Dallas officials said they'd already begun implementing some reforms and studying other measures, they couldn't dodge the legal hammer, either.

"We need to move with a little more urgency," said Trisha Trigilio, a senior staff attorney for the ACLU of Texas, one of the six groups that've filed suit against Dallas County. "I'm glad we all agree in principle" that changes must be made. "We just need to nudge everyone in the right direction sooner."

So far, Dallas County officials haven't given any indication that they're ready to throw in the towel and cut a deal with the plaintiffs.

If anything, they're showing some of the same stubbornness that's causing Harris County to keep digging deeper into its pockets.

"The lawsuit doesn't change anything because we feel like we're already being proactive in assisting the judges and magistrates," said Dallas County First Assistant District Attorney Mike Snipes, a former criminal district court judge. "We understand that we don't want poor folks being in jail just because they're poor. But we're trying to protect our county."

Snipes said he can't respond to a potential settlement in the lawsuit, which is being handled by the county's civil section. However, he said county commissioners and District Attorney Faith Johnson believe they're on the right path and had hoped to have a comprehensive bail reform package in place before the end of the year.

But, as we saw in Harris County, that federal lawsuit raised the stakes. The question now is, which side will blink first?

Brandon Buskey, senior staff attorney with the ACLU's Criminal Law Reform Project, said Dallas County officials could always come to the plaintiffs in the case "and say we are all ears."

"A big part of the problem," Buskey told me, "is there's a real lack of urgency. There are hundreds of people every day still suffering while parties work things out. And many times, policymakers and those kinds of folks tend to draw things out."

So if Dallas County doesn't reach out and attempt to do what at least four other jurisdictions that have been sued outside of Texas did — which is to try to settle it out of court — it's likely in for a costly legal battle.

Somehow, we taxpayers always end up holding the bag, don't we?