When I served as Treasurer of Ohio, helping to keep the state books balanced, the question of whether states should ever hire outside lawyers came up often and comparatively little attention was paid to who was being hired and whether state contracts truly protected the state and aligned with their values. That has long needed to change. Given new data that has come to light about the donations being made by the nation’s biggest law firms and trial lawyers, and the growing number of ethics-related headlines involving states and their outside counsel, there is no better time than now to revisit and kick of some tires.

The new data that has really caught my attention is from Professor Derek Muller at the University of Notre Dame. Professor Muller has been looking at the political donations from the largest law firms in America since 2013 and just posted his analysis of the 2024 election cycle, which showed a truly massive shift to the left amongst almost every law firm he has been tracking in his datasets.

What Professor Muller found for his most recent report—covering contributions during 2023 and 2024—was clear cut: “the vast majority of firms had fewer than 10% of contributions go to major Republican outlets, and the bulk of those saw less than 5%.” And the shift from the last report, in 2020, was especially stark: “92.45% of contributions went to........

© Townhall