Last week brought welcome news for those concerned about the negative influence of partisan trial lawyers in state legal affairs: Utah Attorney General Derek Brown terminated the state’s contract with Motley Rice, the notorious trial lawyers who had been handling the state’s opioid litigation. This decision, reported first by the Wall Street Journal, delivered a significant blow against one of the key players in the Left’s ongoing woke lawfare campaign.
The timing is telling. Brown’s decision comes on the heels of an effort in federal court to disqualify Motley Rice from representing the state for alleged conflicts of interest. According to court filings by OptumRx, the pharmacy benefit manager, Motley Rice obtained confidential government information while serving as “special assistant attorneys general” in Chicago, the District of Columbia, and Hawaii, among other jurisdictions, and then went after OptumRx in opioid cases across the country, all in violation of the ethics rules that govern these situations. As OptumRx noted in its motion, the ethical violations don’t depend “on whether the firm’s lawyers actually use the confidential information gathered in the government investigations.” The sheer possibility that it could is enough to raise serious concerns.
These are not abstract or hypothetical legal arguments. They go to the heart of a deeply troubling arrangement that has allowed left-wing trial lawyers to leverage government power for private gain while advancing a distinctly partisan agenda. I have previously written about the central role played by top plaintiffs’ firms in the Left’s woke lawfare campaign, waging attacks against disfavored industries and conservative policy priorities, and about what an ideological monolith such firms have become.
Motley Rice exemplifies this problem. According to Professor Derek Muller’s research, the firm’s employees gave 99.7% to Democrats in the 2024 cycle. This follows similar findings by the Alliance for Consumers, confirming a pattern of overwhelming partisan allegiance. Joe Rice, Motley Rice’s namesake, a ringleader in opioid litigation, was a prodigious fundraiser for the Biden campaign, so much so that he was considered for an ambassadorship under President Biden—a testament to how intertwined these lawyers have become with Democratic power structures.
The conflicts of interest presented by the shady trial lawyer pipeline have at times been stark, which should not be a surprise considering that the business model itself is slimy. States and cities hire these firms as special assistant attorneys general and grant them extraordinary government powers, including the ability to issue subpoenas on the government’s behalf and to access confidential information. The firms then use these government-granted powers to gather intelligence that can be deployed across their vast portfolio of private litigation. They represent multiple clients—both governmental and private—on overlapping matters, creating labyrinthine conflicts of interest that would be unthinkable in other contexts.
For years, too many Republican attorneys general remained asleep at the switch, either inheriting these arrangements from predecessors without a second thought or naively believing that trial lawyers could separate their 99%+ Democratic partisanship from their representation of Republican-led states. (Recall my report on Patrick Morrisey in West Virginia.)
That era is thankfully ending. And this latest astute move from Attorney General Derek Brown is a major signpost of this change in direction.
Brown joins a growing movement of Republican attorneys general who have taken a stand to confront this problem. Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen fired Motley Rice in 2021. In 2023, newly elected Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird and Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach terminated their states’ relationship with another major trial firm, Morgan & Morgan. Brown, elected in 2024 and sworn in this January, has continued the trend.
This represents yet another instance of a newly elected or appointed attorney general coming into office and immediately terminating the cozy relationships their predecessors maintained with partisan trial lawyers. Each time, these officials have recognized that farming out state legal authority to firms that donate almost exclusively to the opposing party—and that actively pursue litigation in an effort to make the courts a tool of left-wing policy goals—is a betrayal of their constituents’ interests.
The scope of this issue extends beyond these individual decisions. The Supreme Court is currently considering the broader issue of trial lawyer–driven lawfare in Chevron USA v. Plaquemines Parish. There is a growing recognition that this model of outsourcing government legal authority to partisan private actors poses serious governance problems and enables an end-run around democratic accountability.
Motley Rice still has contracts with Washington, D.C., Hawaii, and Alaska. One can only hope that more attorneys general will follow Brown’s example and recognize that hiring firms whose lawyers pursue scorched-earth left-wing activism rather than state interests is indefensible.