This spring, when Ms. Brown’s lawyers asked Special Fed if any of the officers had violated Police Department policies by not providing medical attention, lawyers from the unit first claimed the request wasn’t “relevant.” Then they filed an incomplete answer to the question, asked for more time to respond and eventually missed their own extended deadline. When they finally submitted a response — the officers hadn’t violated any policy or procedure — they broke court procedure. The document was never formally signed by the defendants.

Last month, losing patience, a Manhattan judge ordered the lawyers to explain the delays in a formal memorandum, adding that they needed to get it personally signed by Ms. Miller to ensure “she has approved.”

“There have been fights about the most unnecessary things,” Joshua Moskovitz, one of Ms. Brown’s lawyers, said. “There have been fights about things they know they can’t win and fights where it seems like they’re just fighting. It actually feels tactical at times. It happens too often to be coincidental.”

Similar problems have plagued other cases. In July, for instance, a Brooklyn magistrate judge said he was considering referring a Special Fed lawyer to the court’s grievance committee for a “very troubling” violation of professional rules. The lawyer had refused to let the plaintiff’s lawyer in a police-misconduct lawsuit use the Law Department’s phones to call the judge to question a line of inquiry during a deposition.

Last November, another Brooklyn judge excoriated Special Fed lawyers for ignoring their ethical obligations after it emerged that they knew a plaintiff had accidentally sued the wrong detective for malicious prosecution and moved to dismiss the case — instead of promptly telling the man of his mistake.

A few months earlier, a different Brooklyn judge sanctioned the city after one of the unit’s lawyers “acted improperly” at an officer’s deposition, objecting nearly 600 times to questions, even though many were deemed to be “relevant to the case.”

Special Fed itself was born in 1998, when federal civil-rights lawsuits against the police were rising dramatically, spurred in part by Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani’s new zero-tolerance law-enforcement strategy. The suits had been traditionally handled by the Law Department’s general litigation division.