We’ve seen this said a couple of times by Mississippi’s Democrat Attorney General Jim Hood in response to inquiries about government contracts from the office of attorney general to prominent campaign donors.

During his speech at the Capital Club in downtown Jackson, (Al) Hopkins pointed out campaign donations Hood has received from private attorneys with state contracts. Among other cases, Hopkins mentioned the $14 million fee awarded to Joey Langston and Tim Balducci, private attorneys who represented the state in a case to recover $100 million in overdue taxes from telecommunications giant MCI. Langston, of Booneville, has been one of Hood’s top campaign contributors.
“There is a pattern of behavior that creates an unhealthy perception of your attorney general’s office in the state of Mississippi,” said Hopkins, 66, who’s in private practice in Gulfport. “We don’t know if he’s selling state contracts for campaign contributions or just suffers bad judgment.”
Hood, 45, is a former district attorney from seven counties in north Mississippi and was sworn in to the statewide office in January 2004. He said the attorney general’s office has several contracts that are awarded to private attorneys or law firms on a “first-come, first-served” basis(emphasis added).

I don’t know how many state contracting offices use the “first come – first served” method for awarding multi-million dollar government contracts, but we’re willing to bet it’s not that many.
Hood goes on to say:

“It’s kind of like intellectual property. They’re bringing you an idea,” Hood said. “And we give it to whomever it is, and if they’ve got the ability to handle it and the wherewithal to handle it and the money to back it, they’ve got the case. If they don’t, we encourage them to go out and find other lawyers who they can team up with and work the cases. We don’t do it on partisanship.”

What’s even more interesting here is the sense that Mississippi’s Attorney General is using his office to encourage law firms to bring actions against companies which may actually be doing no harm at all. Yet, the A.G.’s office encourages the law firms and their lawyers to pursue the companies, and the state AND the private lawyers get to reap the benefits of any settlements that the companies agree to make the pursuing lawyers go away. Are we reading this right?