COZY WITH COUNSEL
By Alan Greenblatt
Governing Magazine
October 2008
When states hire outside lawyers, both sides benefit. Or do they?
Dan Greear, who’s running for attorney general of West Virginia, gets angry when he looks over the campaign finance reports of his opponent, Darrell McGraw. Greear knew that, as a four-term incumbent, McGraw would be able to raise more money. What Greear objects to is not the amount, but where the money comes from--often private attorneys who’ve done work for McGraw’s office. “I defy anybody,” Greear says, “to statistically look at his campaign donators and not see the correlation.”
Greear is one of several candidates for attorney general in different states seeking to make an issue out of the use of outside counsel. They argue that it creates at least an appearance of conflict for AGs to take campaign money from someone they hire to help try cases. Outside attorneys, they say, are being handed the state’s police powers, and have an enormous financial incentive to press such power-- especially when they are working on a contingency-fee basis.
