More: Bader in the Examiner on the selection process.

“Worst state attorneys general”, cont’d is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

To Mr. Greear’s advantage, his opponent is a case study of abuse in office. Mr. McGraw, in more than 14 years as West Virginia’s attorney general, has been a pioneer in the practice of filing questionable lawsuits against big companies, secretly doling out the legal work to outside trial lawyer friends who reap millions in fees. Those lawyers then turn around and donate heavily to Mr. McGraw’s re-election.

Polls show the public, in theory, disapproves. In a Tarrance Group survey last year, 75% of West Virginians think an attorney general should publicly disclose outside contracts with lawyers. Nearly 60% think attorneys should have to competitively bid for those jobs.

It’s this that motivates Mr. Greear. “I’ve watched what’s going on and thought: ‘If I were doing this to a client, I’d lose my law license.’ I don’t think any fair-thinking person can think this is good government, or good solid legal representation for West Virginia,” he tells me.

Also helping is that Mr. McGraw’s own sense of political immortality has recently landed him, and his state, in hot water. In 2001, he appointed four private law firms to sue drug companies for alleged deceptive advertising of OxyContin. Having forced a settlement in 2004, he handed his tort allies $3.3 million of the $10 million haul. Mr. McGraw had sued on behalf of state agencies (including the state’s Medicaid program) — yet his office kept the rest of the settlement money.

The federal government, which pays a significant portion of the state’s Medicaid bills, remains furious the program received none of the settlement, and is now threatening to withhold millions in Medicaid money. Mr. Greear is hitting hard on the uproar, using it to suggest Mr. McGraw has lost sight of why he’s suing companies, other than for the headlines.

Darrell McGraw and his outside counsel is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

[A] large deal of the gleeful Spitzerfreude on Wall Street arose from of the poetic justice of Spitzer’s undoing at the hands of the same extra-judicial tactics he regularly used against Wall Street firms and corporate executives when he was attorney general of New York. The real scandal of Spitzer’s career was not so much the former Girls Gone Wild model as the prosecutors gone wild.

My retrospective of Eliot Spitzer as both archetype and victim of overaggressive prosecutors in the July/August American Spectator is now on line at the AEI website.

Prosecutors Gone Wild is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

• First rule of damage control: when you’re in a hole, stop digging. A few weeks ago, we mentioned the West Virginia Attorney General Medicaid scandal (May 19) in which AG Darrell McGraw took it upon himself to spend state funds that he had recovered from Purdue Pharma after suing them for selling Oxycontin. This upset both the federal government, which argues that it has a legal right to some of these funds, and the state legislature, which felt that it should decide how to appropriate state funds. McGraw appears unapologetic and unworried about the federal investigation, but his office did promise the legislature that he would stop spending money. Now LegalNewsline reports that he’s going back on that promise:
  

  Despite promises and a federal investigation, West Virginia Attorney General Darrell McGraw on Wednesday handed out even more of the settlement funds gained in a 2004 agreement with Purdue Pharma.

  McGraw gave $75,000 to the Kanawha Valley Fellowship Home, which will use the money for its drug treatment and education program. He says the program will affect 20 counties.

  The real problem here is not that the state legislature is annoyed — that’s local politics. The real problem is that if the federal government decides that it is entitled to a share of this money, the state is going to have to come up with millions of dollars to give to the federal government — money that McGraw already spent.

• Three weeks ago, we noted that a prominent anonymous medical blogger, “Flea,” was liveblogging his malpractice trial, and we discussed the ramifications for Flea’s case. A few hours after we posted about this, Flea stopped — presumably after his attorney had a fit. But apparently that was at least a few hours, or a few weeks, too late; Flea had left enough clues to enable the plaintiff’s lawyer to figure out that Flea is Robert Lindeman, and she questioned him about it on the stand:
  

  With the jury looking on in puzzlement, Lindeman admitted that he was, in fact, Flea.

  The next morning, on May 15, he agreed to pay what members of Boston’s tight-knit legal community describe as a substantial settlement — case closed.

  The Globe also quotes a trial lawyer as claiming that the plaintiff’s attorney “had telegraphed that she was ready to share Lindeman’s blog — containing his unvarnished views of lawyers, jurors, and the legal process — with the jury,” although it’s not clear to me how his views of lawyers, jurors, and the legal process would be relevant to a medical-malpractice case.

  Incidentally, Flea’s blog is apparently now totally kaput.

Updates – May 31 is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

In 2004, West Virginia settled with Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of Oxycontin, over the increased Medicaid costs allegedly caused by addiction to the drug. The settlement was worth $10 million. Logically, then, that $10 million should have gone to the state’s Department of Health and Human Resources to defray Medicaid costs. But there was a problem. Two problems, actually. The first was that giving the money to the DHHR wouldn’t allow Darrell McGraw, the state Attorney General, to dole out money as he saw fit. The second was that the state shares its Medicaid expenses with the federal government, so giving money to the DHHR would enable the federal government to recover part of the settlement.

The first issue has caused political controversy in West Virginia, because McGraw has given out the settlement proceeds to pretty much everybody except the underfunded DHHR, including private law firms that he hired to work on the case. But even the money that the state actually kept was handed out by McGraw based on his personal whims ($500,000 to establish a state pharmacy school (!) at the University of Charleston) rather than by the state legislature, which is constitutionally tasked with making spending decisions about state money.

But the second issue may be causing legal controversy. Legalnewsline reports that the federal government is now investigating the state’s handling of the funds, trying to find out why it hasn’t been credited for its share of the Medicaid funds. But it’s not as if it’s a secret; the deputy attorney general recently testified as to their thinking:

“We have arranged a methodology that has prevented the federal government from coming back and seizing money,” Hughes said.

Or maybe not. If you’re going to try to cheat the federal government, you should probably be a little more subtle about it. No formal charges have been filed, to be sure, and the federal government may simply resolve the problem by withholding future federal payments to the state. But that certainly won’t fix the problem caused by McGraw’s behavior; it will leave a large hole in the state’s budget which could make them worse off than if he hadn’t sued Purdue in the first place.

West Virginia Attorney General Involved in Medicaid Fraud? is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

W.Va.: McGraw holds off challenge is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

W. Va.’s judge-advocate? is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system