McCollum pulls plug on legal 'dream teams'

In his rush to curry favor with the business lobby in an election year, Attorney General Bill McCollum just pushed a bill through the Legislature that aims to punish trial lawyers. If McCollum knew as much about history as he does political posturing, he'd know that in the long run this new law will hurt Florida's citizens.

In 1995 a group of private attorneys answered the call to fight Big Tobacco and win back the hundreds of millions in Medicaid expenditures that taxpayers had spent caring for poor people sickened by a poisonous product.

Then-Gov. Lawton Chiles made it clear why the state was seeking outside legal help instead of attempting to litigate the case itself: He knew it would be a long, hard battle and the state needed the best talent out there.

It couldn't have been a better deal for the state. Florida paid nothing for the services of the so-called "Dream Team" of 11 lawyers, of which I was a proud member. We took all the risk of embarking on this monumental litigation, spending millions of our own dollars preparing the case.

Two years later the state settled the case for more than $11 billion.

Some people back then wanted to focus on our fees - which were paid by Big Tobacco, not the taxpayer - instead of the fact that our work made Floridians healthier and recouped more than 10 times the amount of money the state had paid out in Medicaid reimbursements.

Because of our work, tobacco companies can't market to our children or sell their products in vending machines. And Joe Camel billboards no longer blight our roads. Because of this the number of Florida children who smoke has dropped to levels not seen since the 1980s.

The only way to get results like that for the citizens of Florida is to provide the financial incentive for attorneys like me to take on hugely difficult and risky cases. If we had failed, we wouldn't have received a penny.

But McCollum, with the willing complicity of Republican Sen. John Thrasher, managed to pass a law that would make it nearly impossible for a group like the Dream Team to ever work on behalf of the state again. Senate Bill 712 fundamentally alters the way the state hires outside legal help.

McCollum's justification for the law was that he wanted to introduce transparency to the process of hiring outside counsel. He could have done that before if he had wanted, and nobody would have argued with him. He said he wanted to require the attorney general to specify why outside contracts were necessary and to post the terms of the deal online.

Again, no one was stopping him from implementing these reasonable measures before.

But McCollum's real goal was to limit the amount of fees that private lawyers can recover. Under the new law, as the size of the award in the case goes up, the percentage of the fee the lawyer can collect goes down.

Under no circumstance can the lawyer or group of lawyers collect more than $50 million in fees - no matter the size of the award, no matter the amount of their own money the attorneys put up to bring the case to trial, no matter the number of years they invested in the case.

That may sound fair to people like McCollum and Thrasher, the new head of the state Republican Party, but it's not. McCollum's friends in the business lobby are thrilled at the prospect that the lawyers who hold them accountable would be paid less.

But the public needs to understand that capping fees in this way will hurt them, too.

The next time someone with the strategic smarts of the old "he-coon," Chiles, puts out a call for the best lawyers to defend the interests of Floridians, the best won't answer. They won't be able to afford to.

Instead, political hacks will call upon their friends at law firms that like no-risk work with a guaranteed payout from state coffers. If McCollum really believes his job is to protect the safety of Florida citizens, then he owes them the best legal counsel.

That talent is not always to be found in the attorney general's office. That explains why he hired his former law firm in Washington, D.C., to bring the lawsuit challenging the historic new health care reform law.

Just for the record, when McCollum cuts that first check of taxpayer money to pay his former colleagues, it will automatically be more than the state ever paid the Dream Team.