AG Watch

South Carolina’s AG Henry McMaster frames the benefits and difficulties of contingency fees nicely: without outside help, the AG’s office simply could not provide adequate legal service in many cases; but too often, states become a leveraging tool for mercenary law firms’ sue-n-settle attacks on vulnerable industries.

As the article notes, General McMaster has introduced a model contract in order to balance these extremes. The sliding pay scale of the contract constricts the number and quality of cases that firms bring to the SC AG, allowing South Carolina to bring cases that the AG alone could not handle, but only the best cases—that is, those with the clearest violations, rather than the deepest pockets.