A Reminder About Elected Officials and the Tort Bar - Climate Litigation Watch

A Reminder About Elected Officials and the Tort Bar

CLW just spotted this, from CEI, as it learns more and more about how AGs and plaintiffs’ lawyers created the climate litigation industry, in part with resources provided by activist donors (including things arguably of value to the individual elected officials):

Among the more interesting facts CLW has learned is that the same plaintiffs’ firms and same AGs are spinning out their same model on other potential profit-center issues — to which use the AGs also are putting outside resources given them by the same activist donors.

This increasingly resembles something of a tort bar/donor/AG complex. More on this soon.

Meanwhile, CLW has learned of law firms engaged by elected officials — including firms receiving massive contingency fee contracts — also having first received handsome grants from activist foundations.

From the information publicly available, a cynic might conclude the charitable grants are to develop the firm’s contingency fee cases. Recall that the firm’s own ‘investment’ in developing the cases — supposedly for less-liquid plaintiffs (like, um, states and major municipalities) — justifies the large contingency fees draining awards of damages supposedly suffered by the taxpayer.

It’s the kind of thing that, once upon a time, was of interest to journalists.

Regardless, CLW sees interesting times ahead on the issue of elected officials and their relationships with tort lawyers.