AUSTIN – Attorney Mark Lanier stands to make millions of dollars for his work on Texas’ antitrust lawsuit against Google – billable time that Attorney General Ken Paxton apparently doesn’t think is any of the public’s business.
Back in December, Paxton announced Texas was leading a multistate coalition in litigation against Google, alleging the company monopolized products and services used by advertisers and publishers in online-display advertising.
Paxton’s office, which boasts more than 4,000 employees, hired two notable law firms to handle the litigation, Keller Lenkner, a Chicago firm, and The Lanier Law Firm in Houston.
The decision to bring in outside counsel sparked a slew of public information requests.
Houston attorney Mark McCaig was the first to post the details of the contingency fee contracts the two law firms signed with state, calling into question the legitimacy of the agreements.
Now, the Office of the Attorney General (OAG) seeks to withhold the time and expense records of the outside counsel.
The Record obtained an OAG letter dated May 24, stating that withholding the time and expense records is necessary to protect the state’s legal strategy.
The OAG is requesting a decision from the Open Records Division on the request for the records.
Earlier this year, Paxton’s office requested $43 million in taxpayer funds in order to pursue the suit against Google.
A Conference Committee Report form, dated May 25, includes an appropriation for outside legal counsel in the amount of $43,283,112 in general revenue funds for fiscal year 2022 for the litigation against Google.
While Lanier’s contract with the OAG allows for his firm to be compensated under a mixed hourly and contingent-fee arrangement upon passage of the state appropriation, Keller Lenkner’s contract is purely a contingent-fee arrangement.
In his article on Big Jolly Times, McCaig made the case that the state’s contingent contracts with the outside law firms may not comply with Section 2254 of the Texas Government Code – a reform passed in the wake of the 1998 tobacco settlement that netted a handful of attorneys billions of dollars.
The section requires Paxton’s office to provide the Legislative Budget Board with information demonstrating that outside lawyers could not reasonably be obtained on an hourly basis.
Paxton’s letter to the LBB states the legal services needed to sue Google cannot be adequately performed by OAG, which employs 750 attorneys.
Paxton has previously stated that the OAG’s contracts with the law firms comply with Section 2254, which requires that outside counsel in cases like this be compensated by a “lodestar” method derived from their hourly billing rates.