Attempts to amend contingency-fee bill fail (UPDATE)

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Republican state senators shot down four amendments Democrats offered Tuesday to a bill that would place a $30 million cap on the contingency fees the state can pay to law firms.

The Senate then voted 23-10 in favor of Assembly Bill 27, which was adopted by the Assembly in May and now goes to Gov. Scott Walker for his signature.

Contingency-fee contracts allow law firms to receive as payment a percentage of whatever money they win in legal actions. Assembly Bill 27 would let the payments rise in accordance with the total amount of money awarded to state government, but would prevent law firms from receiving more than $30 million from a single case.

State Democrats have long questioned why the requirements of the bill, which also calls for details of contingency-fee contracts to be posted to the Internet, should not apply to other sorts of agreements a law firms enters into with the state. On Tuesday, state Sen. Kathleen Vinehout, D-Alma, offered four amendments to the bill, including ones that would require website disclosure of information concerning law firms’ hourly fee contracts and of state contracts with architecture and engineering firms.

Without the amendments, Vinehout said, the bill, “is designed to increase transparency, but only wipes a tiny bit of the mud from the windows of state government.”

Republicans, who outnumber Democrats 18 to 15 in the Senate, tabled each of the amendments without explaining their reasons for doing so. The final vote on the bill, though, was not made along party lines.

State Sen. Fred Risser, D-Madison, broke ranks with the other Democrats to vote in favor of Assembly 27. He recalled the state’s settlement in the nationwide lawsuit against tobacco companies in the late 1990s, when law firms received $75 million in contingency fees for winning a $5.9 billion settlement for the state. Risser, a lawyer, said a contingency-fee contract the firms then had with the state allowed them to send in a bill for $847 million, an amount that was only reduced after lawmakers and the public expressed outrage over the possibility of such a large payout.

“Sure (Assembly Bill 27) doesn’t go far enough,” he said. “But I don’t want it ever to happen again for lawyers to come in and make a deal,” without the public knowing of it.

Assembly Bill 27 is one in a series of so-called tort-reform bills winding their way through the Legislature this session. Critics of these proposals, mainly Democrats, have noted their resemblance to “model legislation” that conservative groups such as the American Legislative Exchange Council and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have urged state legislatures to adopt.

Following the Wisconsin Senate’s adoption of AB 27 on Tuesday, the U.S. Chamber issued a press release calling the bill “the nation’s strongest outside counsel sunshine measure to date.” A representative of the U.S. Chamber attended an Assembly Committee hearing on the bill in March.

Besides placing a $30 million cap on contingency-fee contracts, Assembly Bill 27 would make contingency-fee contracts with law firms subject to approval by the governor. A previous amendment would make the bill’s requirements apply only to law firms hired by the state’s executive branch and would have contract information posted to the Government Accountability Board’s website, rather than the governor’s website.

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