Gov. Tim Kaine plans to meet Saturday in Richmond with family members of victims of the April 16 shootings at Virginia Tech.

Thomas Fadoul, a lawyer who says he represents 20 of the 32 victims' families, announced the meeting in a news release Sunday, and a governor's spokesman confirmed it Monday.

The spokesman, Kevin Hall, said the meeting between Kaine and the families is private and its time and location will not be made public.

Kaine announced Wednesday that he would meet with families, after relatives of 13 victims called for more involvement on a panel Kaine established to investigate the actions of authorities on April 16 and how mental issues of shooter Seung-Hui Cho were addressed before the shootings.

"We just want, as the primary stakeholders, for our focus to be included" in the investigation, Fadoul said Monday. He said he is the first cousin of the father of shooting victim Reema Samaha.

Fadoul said the families he represents are a coalition of relatives of the victims, but he said he was unable to identify the 20 families in that group and only personally has communicated with "a few of them."

Fadoul said he was the spokesman for the entire group of family members and would forward an e-mail request for a list of names to the group. The request was not immediately responded to Monday.

Fadoul said the families still want to be represented on the panel, which Kaine has refused to do, but would "compromise" and accept one of the existing members of the panel as a representative of the victims. Still, he said, the families want "day to day, in real time ... involvement in the nuts and bolts of the investigation so that we can inject the views" of the families.

Hall said the decision not to allow family members on the panel had not changed, but "that doesn't mean, however, that there couldn't be other ways to facilitate more consistent family awareness of the day-to-day actions of the review panel and staff."

Hall said Kaine "has been in touch with most of the families by phone or e-mail, some of them multiple times. The meeting is simply an effort to continue that personal contact, answer any questions about the status of the independent review and diffuse what Mr. Fadoul would characterize, accurately or inaccurately, as some concerns among some family members."

By e-mail Friday, Holly Sherman, mother of shooting victim Leslie Sherman, said she expected the governor to agree to have a person serve as a conduit between the families and the panel. "I think we now have 20 families who will be represented in our family coalition," she wrote.

Not all victims' families feel the same way about participating on the panel. Renee Cloyd, whose daughter Austin Cloyd was killed, said Friday her family is optimistic the investigation will be transparent and open but will reserve judgment until it sees the final product.

"The governor has reached out to us, and we don't plan to meet with him right now because there's not an issue that we feel we need to bring up specifically right now," Cloyd said. "But that's not saying we won't in the future."

Staff writer Angela Manese-Lee contributed to this report.