BATON ROUGE – New Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry has canceled dozens of contracts his predecessor had with private attorneys, saying they had the "appearance of corruption."
A series of WWL-TV investigations exposed former Attorney General Buddy Caldwell's no-bid contracts with several of his top campaign supporters, including campaign manager T. Allen Usry and campaign treasurer E. Wade Shows, as well as Jefferson Parish District Attorney Paul Connick, who endorsed Caldwell in his campaign against Landry.
At the top of the list of canceled contracts were about 60 deals with the private law firms of three district attorneys around the state -- 41 of them worth $1.3 million are with Connick's family law firm, Connick and Connick.
"What we've seen is there's been a pattern of abuse inside this office, which is what we're trying to ferret out," Landry said at a press conference at the State Capitol.
Paul Connick responded Thursday by saying it was Landry's prerogative to cancel the contracts, but vehemently denied that political favoritism got his firm the work with Caldwell.
"The contracts that my private law firm received were not secured through any illegal or unethical backroom political deals," Connick said in an emailed statement. "In fact, my law firm has done work under four attorneys general since 1985 -- William Guste, Richard Ieyoub, Charles Foti and Buddy Caldwell -- more than a decade before I was elected Jefferson Parish district attorney. The inference that I used my public office to secure professional services contracts from the attorney general's office is totally false."
Connick has said that there is nothing unethical about him getting contracts for civil work, not only with the state but even with the parish he serves as an elected prosecutor. Landry said it may not be unethical, but it just looks bad.
"This may not be unethical with the Ethics Code, but we believe it's improer and creates a bad perception," Landry said.
Landry's office said he canceled about 14 contracts for cases handled by St. Landry Parish District Attorney Earl Taylor, worth about $650,000, and another four cases by East Carroll Parish D.A. James Paxton.
In addition, Landry pledged to stop Caldwell's practice of using a special medical fraud statute to hire outside attorneys on what amounts to a contingency fee contract, paid by the drug companies after they struck settlement agreements with the state.
State Rep. Stuart Bishop spearheaded legislation in June 2014 to force the attorney general to hire outside attorneys only on an hourly basis, but Caldwell used pre-existing contracts to have outside attorneys file seven new lawsuits with the same kind of fee arrangement.
Caldwell's office was able to use that arrangement to collect $236 million from pharmaceutical companies, using an arrangement where those defendant companies had to pay private lawyers about $54 million for their work representing the state.
Connick and Connick held contracts in some of those cases, and Loyola Law School Professor Dane Ciolino told WWL-TV it's an ethics violation for contract lawyers to be paid for their public service by the private defendants, rather than from the public fisc.
But Caldwell said the special medical fraud statute made it OK, and he had another ethics attorney give an opinion that the outside attorneys were not "public servants" under the ethics code, as Ciolino claimed.
Landry said Bishop's legislation was "well-meaning" but causes problems in two of the seven cases that are already under way. Still, Bishop said he was encouraged by Landry's moves Thursday, saying, "maybe this is the beginning of the end for the Buddy System."
Melissa Landry, who is not related to Jeff Landry, has been watching Caldwell's contracts for years as head of an industry-backed legal watchdog group called Louisiana Lawsuit Abuse Watch. She cheered the moves by the new attorney general.
"Today is a huge step in the right direction toward correcting some of the sins of the past, and what we hope to see moving forward is a clear, fair and transparent process for how legal contracts will be evaluated and executed in the future," she said. "Given the attorney general's commitment to ending the Buddy System, we fully expect to see that in the coming weeks and months."
Jeff Landry said he is looking at practices in other states to develop a process for publicly selecting outside attorneys. He also announced Thursday that he has ended expensive hourly contracts with outside attorneys in the state's oil spill litigation against BP, which provided expensive work for eight law firms that donated to Caldwell's campaigns, but is mostly over anyway.
Attorney General Landry also announced a new policy that prohibits attorneys on his staff from doing private legal work on the side, except to finish cases already in progress.
